The CBS News debut of Tony Dokoupil was embarrassing in ways that didn’t seem possible.
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Generally speaking, when presenting oneself as the vanguard for a radical new editorial direction—one that supposedly cuts through the ossified liberal bromides that have long dominated the nightly news—you do not want your debut broadcast to be reminiscent of an infamously botched campus newscast. Unfortunately, Tony Dokoupil, the newly installed anchor of CBS Evening News and the face of the company’s nouveau regime-friendly rebrand, was not so lucky. Monday was Dokoupil’s inaugural shift at the desk. How did it go? Well, to quote the man himself, “first day, big problems here.”
“First day, big problems here.” This is embarrassing. Newly installed CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has major problems during his first regular broadcast. The inexperience of new CBS News chief Bari Weiss is on full display. pic.twitter.com/ybEWwGb3N4
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) January 6, 2026
As you can see from the video above, partway through one of his camera-facing monologues, a noticeably wooden Dokoupil became flummoxed during a transition from Venezuela to a report on Sen. Mark Kelly’s besiegement by the Department of War. Due to some sort of slipup in the production room, Dokoupil thought he was instead pivoting to the embattled Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. So when a slideshow of Kelly’s hairless visage appeared on the screen, Dokoupil fell bracingly silent. What followed were 30 seconds of agony. He tried to kick the segment over to a reporter on the field, who did not answer the call. He pleaded, hilariously, to anyone in the studio who might be able to help: “Are we going to Kelly here?” Eventually, Dokoupil hastily caught up with the teleprompter midsentence, rattling off the many vindictive debasements that Pete Hegseth is wielding against Kelly. Afterward, everyone just moved on.
CBS Evening News, like all major broadcasts of its type, has historically prided itself on polish and seamlessness. It seeks to deliver a brisk 30-minute recap of the day’s headlines without any halting clauses, dropped prepositions, or dead air. So, on a purely mechanical level, Dokoupil’s debut was a massive dud. But what makes the failure more embarrassing is in the haughtiness of Bari Weiss—inveterate moderate, rich-guy whisperer, and freshly enshrined editor in chief of CBS News—who made a ridiculous demonstration of her rejiggering of the company and the elevation of Dokoupil. Weiss is of the opinion that CBS is on the cusp of unlocking a new golden age of journalism, and that this is achievable only by detaching the network from party lines. The faulty thesis, therefore, is that there is sacred integrity in becoming more amenable to the various degenerate policy proposals ventured by the Trump administration. If the president believes that American prosperity hinges on the deportation of all foreign nationals to a prison colony in El Salvador, Weiss’ CBS is at least willing to hear him out.
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What has resulted from this promise so far? Well, there was a series of obnoxious posts made by CBS’s official X account in the hours before Dokoupil’s introduction, one of which asserted that, unlike earlier incarnations of the newscast, his iteration will “love America”—an editorially meaningless sentiment that seems to exist to coddle precisely one man. Elsewhere, Weiss hosted a much-ballyhooed prime-time town hall with Erika Kirk, a woman who has done more media in the past six months than maybe anyone else on the planet. (It predictably produced zero splashy moments.) Most flagrantly, Weiss spiked a 60 Minutes segment about that aforementioned Salvadoran prison for no convincing reason other than the chance that it might upset Stephen Miller too much.
It is hard to overstate just how facile this whole enterprise has proved to be. The fiction that Weiss has leveraged throughout her media career is that she’s a unique thinker and a canny operator—a woman in possession of an outsider-y je ne sais quoi that, if extrapolated, could connect an unruly and decentralized information ecosystem. (She appears to trust in her own abilities to do so: Weiss has stated that her goal at CBS is to “redraw the lines of what falls into the acceptable debate.”) What is becoming increasingly apparent, however, is that Weiss’ most useful skill is her ability to be charming at ghoulish masters-of-the-universe soirees and enthusiastically pliable to the whims of the fabulously wealthy people those get-togethers tend to attract. After all, this is how she infiltrated the inner workings of the Trump-aligned Ellison family—owners of Paramount Skydance and, downstream of that, CBS. Every decision she has made since getting the job seems the result of a single-minded desire to please her new bosses. You could say she understands the assignment.
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This turn has directly benefited Dokoupil, who was previously ambling around the network’s morning show before getting tapped as its evening leading man. What landed him in Weiss’ good graces? Well, one of Dokoupil’s most viral moments occurred in 2024, when, during an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss his book about Israel’s war in Palestine, he likened the author to an extremist. (The broadcaster chastised Dokoupil for his line of questioning on a company call, only for outgoing Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone to chastise CBS executives for chastising him.) For the Ellison family, who have made their close association with Benjamin Netanyahu no secret, the pairing was a match made in heaven.
Dokoupil will be back on the air tonight. I imagine, or hope, his second stint at the desk will go smoother than the first. CBS will continue to chug along under the stewardship of Weiss. But I find it hard to conceive that the image her leadership so desperately courts—a renegade broadcast company, steelier, rawer, and ineffably realer than its competitors—will ever take hold. For now, CBS News’ only defining feature is its highly visible capture by, and capitulation to, ultrawealthy forces outside the network. That is a very old story in America, and it has left Doukopil twisting in the wind. A few days before his debut, the anchor was caught clapping back at a random troll on CBS’s Instagram page. Doukopil claimed that his night shift will be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite.” Yeah, buddy, like that’s up to you.
