Tony Dokoupil's Rough Patch: Can CBS's Trump-Friendly Anchor Survive the Bari Weiss Era?

Tony Dokoupil's ascension to anchor of the CBS Evening News in January 2025 was supposed to represent a bold reinvention of the network under new leadership from Bari Weiss and Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison. Instead, it's become a cautionary tale about ambition outpacing preparation. On his very first night, Weiss—the network's new chief and a legacy media critic who quit the New York Times—walked into the newsroom and directly edited his teleprompter for a segment on Trump's military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro, adding lines that framed the operation as strategically brilliant. The edit was so poorly executed it appeared twice, leaving Dokoupil stumbling on air for several excruciating seconds. One former CBS anchor's reaction was blunt: "What a disaster... I would've fucking killed her."

Dokoupil, described as "hospital-drama-handsome," came to the Evening News from CBS Mornings, where he co-hosted with Gayle King. Weiss recruited him as the face of her vision for a recalibrated CBS News—one that would reject what she calls the "legacy media" obsession with "academics or elites" and shift the network a few degrees rightward. In a populist video manifesto introducing himself to viewers, Dokoupil adopted this messaging, with Weiss coaching him just out of frame. The internal reception was toxic. "He's deeply lacking in self-awareness," one current CBS correspondent told Vanity Fair. When a viewer objected to his mission statement, Dokoupil responded on social media that his show would be "more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era"—a jaw-dropping boast that horrified CBS veterans. "I just don't even understand how you could say something like that," recalls a former CBS executive. "He completely lost the room."

The ratings tell the story: In his first few months, Dokoupil's Evening News has plummeted to lows not seen this century, while he's been "battered by the press for missteps on air." Behind the scenes, the Weiss takeover has created a newsroom gripped by fear and paranoia. Ten staffers have already left the Evening News this year alone, with sources reporting that "anyone caught talking to reporters will be summarily fired." This account is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former CBS staffers and industry insiders.

Dokoupil's rise was meteoric but built on shaky ground. Before television, he was a writer—a good one. Fareed Zakaria, who edited him at Newsweek, recalls he "wrote well." Dokoupil produced a notable feature about his drug-smuggling father and adapted it into a book, *The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana*. He broke into TV at MSNBC, where he met and married Katy Tur, herself a rising political correspondent. When he moved to CBS, veterans remembered him as earnest, dedicated, and possessing "really nice, relaxed personality." He quickly earned a reputation as an exceptional writer. Yet there were early warning signs: In 2016, his debut on the Evening News was so botched—he halted mid-live shot to look offscreen, creating 10 seconds of dead air—that executive producer Steve Capus erupted in the control room: "This guy will never be on my fucking show ever again."

Now, Dokoupil embodies the tensions at the heart of the Weiss revolution. She and the Ellisons (Larry Ellison, Oracle's billionaire cofounder, funded much of the Skydance-Paramount deal) are stalwart Trump supporters and Israel advocates. The theory animating their vision is that audiences have abandoned legacy media not out of distrust but out of frustration with perceived elitism—and that a rightward adjustment will bring them back. So far, that theory is failing spectacularly. Dokoupil's appointment was meant to signal a new era of accountability and populist authenticity. Instead, it's become a symbol of a newsroom in crisis, of a talented writer-turned-anchor whose self-awareness couldn't keep pace with his ambitions, and of a network experiment that may have already run aground.