Tony Dokoupil Excoriated By His Own CBS Colleagues in Splashy Vanity Fair Profile: ‘Good Eye Candy,’ But ‘Useful Idiot’

CBS News

Tony Dokoupil is “hospital-drama-handsome” and has a plum new gig as the anchor of CBS Evening News, but the knives are out for him in the newsroom after “tumbling ratings and savage reviews” — and an unprecedented level of meddling by network chief Bari Weiss — as detailed in a blistering new profile by Aidan McLaughlin at Vanity Fair.

Dokoupil’s turn in the anchor chair this past January got off to a rocky start with tech problems and accusations he was being overly unctuous with a shoutout for Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the end of a broadcast from Miami, coverage of President Donald Trump that critics pounced on to pan for being even more obsequious, plus the growing concerns about his perceived acquiescence to Weiss‘ heavy thumb on the scale of the show’s journalism to satisfy David Ellison, the head honcho at parent company Paramount Skydance.

The perception is so grim that an actual, literal dumpster fire next to the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City in March went viral for being a brutally apt metaphor.

McLaughin, the magazine’s Washington correspondent and former editor in chief here at Mediaite, chatted with “more than 20 current and former CBS staffers and industry insiders” about Dokoupil’s role as “the face of the Weiss revolution” at CBS News, covering everything from Weiss’ “unusual” move to edit his first night teleprompter script (“I would have f*cking killed her,” said a former CBS News anchor about the mortifying on-air errors that resulted) to his role as a pawn in Ellison and Weiss’ efforts to reshape the network.

The hope was to relaunch CBS Evening News with Dokoupil as “a relatable face in touch with the country’s problems and an antidote to the partisan politics of an increasingly polarized nation,” wrote McLaughlin, but instead, the “new regime” is viewed as having “partisan politics” — meaning Ellison’s support for Trump and Weiss’ hostility towards legacy media institutions — as a key motivator.

Dokoupil had won accolades for his writing and frank reporting, McLaughlin noted, but his hiring was viewed as Weiss settling for what she could get rather than a well-earned promotion.

“He very much was not Bari’s first choice,” one CBS News correspondent told Vanity Fair. “He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the f*cking job. I mean, she wanted Bret Baier. She wanted Anderson Cooper. She wanted a name, and she does not see Tony Dokoupil as a name. A useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”

Another current CBS correspondent bashed Dokoupil as “deeply lacking in self-awareness” after he claimed he would be “more accountable and more transparent than [Walter] Cronkite,” the legendary journalist who was the first anchor of CBS Evening News when the network’s nightly broadcast rebranded with that name in 1963. Another former executive at the network said Dokoupil “completely lost the room” with that boast, adding “I just don’t even understand how you could say something like that.”

Dokoupil’s “glazing Marco f*cking Rubio” got brutalized by his colleagues as well with one saying it exposed his “lack of sophistication” as a journalist and another calling it “outrageous” and adding, “It just alienates the audience. I don’t think even a MAGA Republican wants to see that in their news.”

Even Dokoupil’s television-ready good looks weren’t spared. One producer pointed out how “TV is superficial and it’s fake,” and Dokoupil was qualified for the gig because “you just have to be good eye candy” — but that left the newbie anchor with “the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with…Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”

Dokoupil isn’t expected to get the boot any time soon, however. “CBS doesn’t really have a choice right now,” one former CBS News executive said. “They’ve got to keep him in the chair, because they have gone through anchors faster than postmen go through shoes.”

Read the article at Vanity Fair.

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