Last month, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss decided to make Tony Dokoupil, then the host of the network’s three-hour morning show, the new lead anchor on CBS Evening News. In any other circumstance, it might be hard to figure out how this promotion was issued to a guy whose job was to be a court jester for bleary-eyed Americans getting ready to go to work. But the thought process here is pretty easy to follow: Dokoupil, a Zionist, made a fool of himself trying to grill Ta-Nehisi Coates during a 2024 interview about his latest book, which features a chapter about Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinian people. The previous CBS regime reprimanded Dokoupil for his pro-apartheid line of questioning, but Weiss wanted to make it clear that she rewards that kind of thought in the newsroom.
Put more directly: This moron got himself a fancy new job by being an ingratiating dipshit. Dokoupil officially took over as lead anchor over the weekend, where he was entrusted to update viewers about the United States’ murderous attack on Venezuela that resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro. A few days before his debut, Dokoupil released a statement in which he repeated many of Weiss’s favorite platitudes, promising to correct the sins committed by previous versions of CBS Evening News.
“On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” he said, “because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” He later insisted that he would be “more accountable and more transparent than [Walter] Cronkite or any one else of his era.”
On Saturday, during an interview with former television host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it was hard to figure out in what ways Dokoupil was privileging the perspective of the average American. Given the opportunity to question one of the architects of an illegal kidnapping plot that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people, Dokoupil decided to help Hegseth cut a promo: “Mr. Secretary, today at the press conference, you said, and I’m going to say it slowly so I make sure I get it right, ‘Maduro effed around and found out.’ And that’s obviously a message not only to Maduro, but to many American adversaries around the world … What’s next here? What’s the message? Who did you have in mind when you said ‘eff around and find out,’ globally?”
Hey, Weiss was never looking for a news anchor capable of asking basic follow-up questions, or holding accountable anyone in a position of real power. She just wants a generic dope who shares her stupid, evil beliefs and will go on the news every night and be charming. Dokoupil has yet to clear that relatively low bar, though. Monday’s show featured several seconds of dead air after Dokoupil got confused about which news story he was supposed to be reading, and Tuesday’s edition ended with a bizarre segment in which Dokoupil spent way too long explaining a stupid right-wing meme to the audience for the sake of saluting Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the “ultimate Florida Man.” Even in 2015, this shit would have flopped.
Dokoupil’s performance so far fits neatly into Weiss’s larger project: molding CBS News into the kind of news organization that does the opposite of what it claims. Her goal isn’t to turn CBS Evening News into a program that prizes the perspective of average Americans over “elites”—how such a vague directive would be practically implemented isn’t even worth thinking about—but one that more efficiently broadcasts her own anxious, blinkered view of the world. The key to Weiss’s professional success has always been her self-absorption, her ability to convince herself, and those in positions of wealth and influence, that her own strange perspective is the dominant one.
This is an easier to trick to pull off when Weiss is talking to a captive audience of 100,000 iPad boomers, but her attempts to scale up are revealing that she simply does not know how to run an organization that actually has to report news. She can go on inventing spurious reasons to kill stories, insisting that anyone cares what Erika Kirk still has to say, and believing that being rude to Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only qualification a nightly news host requires, but the cracks are already starting to show.
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