Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly has blasted new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil over an embarrassing segment in which he cried on air.
The MAGA-coded host, whose move into the evening slot at CBS has gotten off to a disastrous start, has been widely mocked for choosing to promote his new role by sobbing on camera about how his childhood in Miami, Florida, was disrupted by his drug-dealing father.
Kelly ripped into Dokoupil on her show with a blunt assessment: “There’s no crying in evening news.”
“There might be some crying when a president is shot and assassinated right before your very eyes, like we saw with Walter Cronkite—there was like a wiping of the eyes when he took off the glasses to report that JFK had been shot and killed,” Kelly said. “That’s as far as he went. That’s as far as most evening news anchors would ever have gone, traditionally.”
After spending several minutes further criticizing Dokoupil and his credentials as a reporter, Kelly then teed up the viral clip of the CBS Evening News anchor weeping on air during his “Live From America Tour,” in which he became emotional about returning to Miami.
“To help people understand why I have such a reaction,” Dokoupil said while repeatedly trying to compose himself and dramatically wiping tears from his eyes. “Florida is where I grew up. My grandmother’s here, my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, cousins, and it’s where I would have spent all of my childhood, but we left because my father got in trouble with business. We laugh about it now, but he was a drug dealer, and he went to jail.”
“The reason it’s so emotional for me is because I feel like I was robbed of the full Miami experience,” he added.
While playing the clip, Kelly provided her own mocking commentary, noting that Dokoupil was “still crying” and pointing out how often he wiped his eyes.
“My god, no. It’s a no. It’s a no,” Kelly said after the clip ended. “I thought for sure that story was going to end in ‘and they were all killed in a house fire. I was the sole survivor,’ in which case I would have excused the multiple tears that preceded. It turns out the dad had some problems, eurgh, I’m sorry to hear it—the sobbing? the voice quivering, the inability to recover. What is that?”
The “problems” referenced by Kelly involve Dokoupil’s father, Tony Dokoupil Sr., who was a major drug dealer in the 1970s and 1980s before losing everything and becoming homeless, penniless, and eventually being arrested and jailed in the early 1990s.
In a 2014 CBS News profile, Dokoupil said his father’s drug empire was so lucrative that it helped pay for him to attend the now $53,000-a-year Gulliver Preparatory School in South Florida whose whose alumni include Jeb Bush’s children. He also attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University in Manhattan.
He and his wife, MS NOW anchor Katy Tur, live in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive enclaves.
Dokoupil’s father left his family when his son was just six years old, and Dokoupil and his mother moved from Miami to Maryland in 1986. In a 2008 Newsweek article, Dokoupil described how he and his mother traveled across the country that year in what he later realized was a desperate treasure hunt to recover large quantities of cash his father had hidden during his drug-dealing days.
Dokoupil, a former Daily Beast reporter, later reconnected with his father while researching his memoir, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana.
Dokoupil’s new role at CBS News under the network’s new right-wing boss, Bari Weiss, has gotten off to a shaky start. His debut on Monday saw him struggle to figure out which segment he was supposed to be presenting, with Tuesday’s show also featuring an embarrassing brown-nosing and “salute” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment.
