On Thursday night’s “CBS Evening News” broadcast, its anchor, in his fifth night on the job, strained for a unifying moment of grace.
Reporting from Minneapolis in the aftermath of an ICE agent shooting and killing 37-year-old mother Renée Good, Tony Dokoupil spoke for a bit over 90 seconds, in a garbled word salad that credited, and blamed, both sides of a political issue, if it said anything at all. Dokoupil acknowledged both opposition to ICE and “people who want to see our immigration laws enforced, legally and peacefully and with safety for all.” Calling both pro- and anti-ICE beliefs “deeply American sentiments,” Dokoupil asked viewers to “find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us” and to “make things better and keep things decent.”
For fairness’ sake, I should state that I am not opposed to mutual respect, improving the nation, or the concept of decency. That’s because they’re airy, vague concepts, the kind of thing one says to position oneself as a moral arbiter despite not really having a stance. In attempting to extrapolate a grand statement from a horrifying and distressing news story, Dokoupil found the perfect Dokoupilian angle: Listen to me, even as I say nothing at all. The anchor who promised, as he prepared to launch his and his boss Bari Weiss’ reinvention of the newscast, to outdo Walter Cronkite had, in Minneapolis, a chance to emulate the late anchor. His speech, though, played more like one of Jerry Springer’s “Final Thoughts,” in which the talk-show host vapidly, but with feeling, exhorted his audience to “Take care of yourselves — and each other.”
But then, to go Cronkite mode would require a certain clarity of vision. Dokoupil said nothing other than that someone needs to fix all the problems — or, really, we all do! But he said it with a dudgeon and sense of puffed-up drama that made for a painful mismatch with his lack of substance.
In his first week on the job, and in the bizarre publicity blitz that preceded it, Dokoupil has attempted to position himself as something more than anchor: He seems to be, in his mind, the main character of the news. Take the grandiosity of his ascent to the role, in which CBS News put forward a manifesto of the newsroom’s guiding principles. Many journalists have managed to take on high-profile jobs without necessitating a down-from-the-mountaintop declaration of ideology. Many, also, have traveled to places where news breaks without releasing videos self-aggrandizingly declaring “Things change — that’s the news.” And a segment taped for Miami’s CBS affiliate in which Dokoupil opened presents centered around his hometown like a Dolphins jersey and a set of dominoes played like deleted footage from “The Jennifer Hudson Show,” not a news anchor on the job. The job of anchor has evolved, but come on: Is it not beneath the dignity of the guy in the chair at 6:30 p.m. to open presents on-air?
Then there’s Dokoupil’s sliding and elusive understanding of where lies the line between news and opinion broadcasting, as in his Minneapolis Final Thought or his attempted-humor “salute” to the many roles Marco Rubio plays in the Trump administration, in which the anchor declared “Whatever you think of his politics, you’ve got to admit, it’s an impressive résumé.” (No one has to admit that — but then, a hallmark of CBS News editor-in-chief and careerlong opinion journalist Weiss’ relentless rhetorical style is to posit that, whatever one’s political commitments, we can all come together to agree that hers are the right ones.)
And there’s his placing his personal story squarely at the center of things. Reporting and reading the news is less, for Dokoupil, a job than a star turn. A segment, in the same visit to Miami where he was bestowed with presents, in which the anchor broke down in tears, wiping his eyes and declaring how exhausted he was, was unbecoming in any context other than the most craven producerial instinct. One sensed the hunt for a viral moment. But whatever the job of an anchor is in 2026, it isn’t this.
There’s some precedent for the talent-led approach to this particular broadcast. Twenty years ago, at a moment when the nightly newscasts were far more central to American life than they are today, newly-installed “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric was pilloried for revisions of the newscast that seem, by comparison, small. “There were fewer headlines, more news features, and off-the-cuff reactions from Couric,” read New York magazine’s coverage, looking back at Couric’s start midway through her vexed five-year tenure. Couric had attempted to plug her personality — quite familiar to viewers given her status as the most-popular morning news anchor in America — into a 6:30 p.m. timeslot. It didn’t work, and Couric, chastened, just read the news going forward. Her successors in the role cut lower profiles.
Dokoupil is attempting something grander, though, than Couric ever did: Though the former “Today” star invited guest commentators on air for a doomed segment called “FreeSpeech,” she didn’t, herself, break into declarations of What Needed To Be Done about issues. Her reporting spoke for itself. And for many reasons, perceptions around gender among them, it is very hard to imagine Couric leaving in the broadcast footage of herself weeping.
The anchor has, in a week that began with the U.S. overthrow of a foreign head of state and continues with raging tension over the presence of armed immigration cops in American cities, made himself the story. (Here I am writing about him, after all.) Dokoupil has already achieved his dream of outdoing Cronkite in one specific way: Cronkite reported the news. Dokoupil’s approach has been to become the news. It’s an unappealing display of vanity and a misunderstanding of what news is and does. But it’s keeping his name in headlines. Perhaps, for him and for CBS’ new leadership, that’s enough.
