New CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has sparked a fresh wave of ridicule after a cringeworthy segment in which he started crying on air.
The MAGA-coded host, whose career under the network’s new right-wing boss, Bari Weiss, has already gotten off to a disastrous start, was being interviewed in South Florida as part of his “Live From America Tour” to commemorate his first week in the role.
The segment soon took an embarrassing turn as Dokoupil wiped away tears while explaining why he loves coming back to Miami so much.
Tony Dokoupil frequently struggled to compose himself throughout his few broadcasts thus far. Screengrab/CBS News
“It makes me emotional, it’s so funny,” Dokoupil said, later asking to “let me get a second here” as he composed himself.
“To help people understand why I have such a reaction,” he added, before pausing for dramatic effect. “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.
Some viewers didn’t buy the sob story, however, and questioned why the anchor of CBS News’ flagship evening broadcast would present himself on air in such a manner.
“This ‘oh shucks’ schtick is exhausting,” Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that analyzes online extremism, posted on X. “You’re the new face of a global newsroom, not a kid whose dad brought him along to work.”
Tony Dokoupil reporting from Doral, Florida. CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images
David Sirota, editor-in-chief of investigative news outlet The Lever, wrote: “The most famous scene in Broadcast News was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a guidebook…the media industry is now literally a satirical movie.” Sirota shared a clip from the 1987 film in which a recently hired news anchor is found to have staged himself crying during a segment where he interviewed a rape victim.
A veteran communications expert with a background in media also trashed the segment, writing on X: “When the anchor loves to be the center of the evening news.
“If you want to make a magazine show, put this production under the CBS entertainment division and give us back Jericka Duncan or Weijia Jiang calmly presenting us good reporting gathered by your best field reporters.”
Elsewhere, Ben Meiselas, founder of the left-leaning media company MeidasTouch, bluntly posted: “Pull it together man.”
Tony Dokoupil’s shaky start at CBS Evening News is the latest embarrassment that has rocked the now MAGA-friendly network’s newsroom. Michele Crowe/CBS News via Getty Images)
Dokoupil’s father, Tony Dokoupil Sr., was indeed a major drug dealer in Miami who eventually walked out on his family. In a 2014 profile on CBS News, Dokoupil said his father’s drug empire was so successful it helped fund his family’s lavish lifestyle and paid for him to go to the now $53,000-a-year Gulliver Preparatory School in South Florida as a child.
Tony Dokoupil and his father, convicted drug dealer, Anthony Edward Dokoupil. YouTube
“If you smoked Colombian marijuana in the ’70s or ’80s, I owe you a thank-you card,” Dokoupil said. Dokoupil and his mother left Miami and relocated to Maryland when he was 6 years old. Dokoupil, a former Daily Beast and Newsweek reporter, later reconnected with his father, while researching his memoir, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana.
This is not the only embarrassing moment of Dokoupil’s foray into evening news. The host, who aspires to be more revered than CBS News’ legendary anchor Walter Cronkite, struggled to read a teleprompter and then failed to figure out which segment he was supposed to be presenting on his first night hosting the broadcast on Monday.
He followed up his shaky start with another cringe-inducing moment Tuesday, when he heaped praise on the “many lives and many jobs” of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The anchor ended the segment—which featured AI-generated images of Rubio in multiple roles, including prime minister of Greenland and head of Hilton Hotels—with: “Marco Rubio: we salute you. You are the ultimate Florida man.”
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment.
