Tony Dokoupil Is the Face of the Bari Weiss Revolution at CBS News. Will He Survive It?

The video was not well received inside CBS. “He’s deeply lacking in self-awareness,” offers one current CBS correspondent. The response to the new show has been at times hostile, and Dokoupil hasn’t exactly handled the criticism elegantly. In response to one viewer who objected to his mission statement, Dokoupil wrote in a social media comment that his show would be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era.”

“I just don’t even understand how you could say something like that,” says one former CBS executive who worked closely with Dokoupil. “He completely lost the room.”

CBS News declined to make Dokoupil available for an interview. “Tony Dokoupil is an exceptional talent and experienced journalist who continues to build a program designed to reach audiences wherever they consume the news,” the network said in a statement. “While Vanity Fair’s unnamed sources continue to peddle old and false rumors, that won’t stop Tony and his team from doing what they do best: reporting the news and telling the truth.”

As the face of the Weiss revolution at CBS News, Dokoupil is seen industry-wide as a vessel for her long-standing criticisms of the legacy media. His show is a test for her apparent view that what’s needed to bring audiences back is to shift CBS a few degrees to the right in order to neatly align with Weiss’s own distinct brand of objectivity. That theory has not exactly been validated so far. In his first few months on the job, Dokoupil was battered by the press for missteps on air while ratings have dropped to lows not seen this century.

Weiss’s hostile takeover of the news division has produced a newsroom rife with tension and paranoia. Ten staffers have left the Evening News this year alone, and there is palpable fear among those who remain. “Anyone caught talking to reporters will be summarily fired,” one CBS source told me earlier this year. (CBS declined to comment when asked about this.) This account of Dokoupil’s tenure is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former CBS staffers and industry insiders, many of whom were not authorized to speak publicly.

Dokoupil is fond of reminding people that before his career in television, he was a writer. “He was a bright guy, he was hardworking,” says Fareed Zakaria, who was an editor at Newsweek when Dokoupil worked for the magazine. “He wrote well, as I recall.” Dokoupil wrote features and personal essays, including one for The New Republic that described—in graphic detail—his second circumcision, undergone when he converted to Judaism to marry his first wife, Danielle Haas.

For Newsweek, he wrote a riveting piece about his drug-smuggling father that he later adapted into a book, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana. It’s a breezy read about his childhood bouncing between homes in Miami and Maryland as his father bounced between benders fueled by cocaine and prostitutes. Dokoupil’s father moved weed by the ton, and by 1987, he had a million dollars to his name. Within three years, he had nothing, the money blown up his nose or into the pockets of women he barely knew. The experience was formative: In a January interview with a local station in Miami, Dokoupil broke down in tears recalling his tumultuous childhood.

Dokoupil’s television career started at MSNBC. It was there that he met Katy Tur, then a rising star of the 2016 presidential campaign. Tur spotted Dokoupil on the air and began asking around about him. They started dating, and would later marry and have two children together. Soon after he met Tur, Dokoupil left for CBS News, and he was well-liked at the network. The former executive recalls being “impressed with his poise and his writing ability” when he was first hired, and his “really nice, relaxed personality.” Another veteran executive who worked closely with him says he was “very earnest, very dedicated, very serious, but definitely [got] noticed because he took the work seriously. He quickly gained a reputation for being a great writer, and that went a particularly long way at a place like CBS News at the time.”

The fresh-faced reporter made his debut on the Evening News in 2016 for a segment on a daredevil who used suction cups to scale Trump Tower. Dokoupil botched the hit so badly—halting in the middle of the live shot to look offscreen, leaving a 10-second stretch of dead air—that Steve Capus, the show’s executive producer at the time, lost it in the control room. “This guy will never be on my fucking show ever again,” Capus said, according to two sources who witnessed the incident.

His big break came in 2019, when he was named cohost of CBS This Morning alongside Gayle King and Anthony Mason. “Tony went from weekend news, just catching weather pieces and learning how to be on broadcast, to being thrown into the morning anchor chair,” recalls a second former producer who worked closely with Dokoupil. “And that kind of hurdle-jumping never happens.”

This rapid ascent was aided by two things: Dokoupil’s past as a writer and, according to almost everyone I spoke with for this story, his telegenic looks. “TV is superficial and it’s fake,” the producer says. “You just have to be good eye candy, and he was good eye candy. He had a good chunk of hair on his head, and he’s better looking than John Dickerson.” (People magazine named Dickerson, a former Face the Nation host, one of the Sexiest Newsmen Alive in 2017.) But Dokoupil’s quick rise came with drawbacks. “Tony has the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with,” the producer adds. “And they’re filled with it, because they’re all full of vanity. But Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”

That morning-show perch delivered the watershed moment for Dokoupil as far as a public profile goes: An October 2024 sit-down with Ta-Nehisi Coates about The Message, a book of essays including one on the oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank. (Coates is now a senior staff writer at Vanity Fair and did not participate in this story.) Dokoupil pelted Coates with loaded questions, at one point asking: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?” As the interview came under fire for its aggressive tone, panic spread internally. The questions Dokoupil asked hadn’t gone through the network’s editorial process.

“Everybody was in shock, because he really went rogue,” says the producer. Before the interview, questions were vetted by the network’s standards department, Dokoupil’s team, and the show’s executive producer. But Dokoupil went off-script, surprising even his own staff. Initially, Dokoupil told leadership that he would apologize. There was talk of a suspension.

After a few days of discussion, however, Dokoupil changed his mind about apologizing. By that point, he had found friends in higher places. Shari Redstone, who at the time controlled Paramount Global and CBS News, publicly chastised network leadership for rebuking him.

Weiss’s website The Free Press published multiple articles condemning CBS leadership for its handling of the interview fallout. In one, the editors accused Coates of “echoing the new consensus of the powerful” and hailed Dokoupil for challenging him: “It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus.”

The Coates interview is seen by many in the industry as what drove Weiss to appoint Dokoupil to the Evening News anchor chair. That, and a lack of alternatives. “She called everyone on planet Earth,” says a prominent agent. “And that was her problem. In doing so, she demonstrated she didn’t really know how the process worked.”

“He very much was not Bari’s first choice,” the correspondent says. “He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the fucking 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.”

If that first Monday was bad, the next night of Dokoupil’s tenure on the Evening News was worse. It was the fifth anniversary of January 6, and he marked the day with a brief bulletin framed around Trump’s revisionist history of the Capitol riot. “President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of, quote, ‘whitewashing’ it,” Dokoupil said. “We’ll be right back.”

The “reader,” as that kind of script is known in broadcast-speak, was initially worded differently by the show’s writers. Dokoupil personally rewrote the line, according to the first producer. “I saw it and I was just like, What the fuck?”

After the break, Dokoupil delivered a segment examining memes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In an ad-libbed line that went viral, the anchor signed off, “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida Man.” The White House loved the segment.

“The Marco Rubio thing was outrageous,” says one CBS News journalist. “It just alienates the audience. I don’t think even a MAGA Republican wants to see that in their news.” For the CBS correspondent, the moment reflected Dokoupil’s “lack of sophistication” as a journalist. “This is what happens when you get somebody who’s only ever worked on a morning show, where he just thinks, Oh yeah, why don’t we dedicate two minutes of this 19-minute broadcast to glazing Marco fucking Rubio?”

Dokoupil, according to a source close to him, has no regrets about his first few months on the job. He has admitted that “less is more with voice,” the source says, and that the tone he developed on the morning show doesn’t always work for a nightly news broadcast. But overall, he sees the outrage over segments like the Rubio meme salute as overblown.

After the January 6 incident, CBS News justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who spent years covering the riot and its aftermath, spoke out on the network’s editorial call the next morning. He urged the newsroom to avoid promoting false claims on the air. MacFarlane, according to a source familiar with his thinking, found the coverage “highly objectionable and personally gutting.” Within a few weeks, he told the network he was quitting.

And on night four of Dokoupil’s debut week, the number two producer on the Evening News was marched out of the broadcast center by corporate security. Javier Guzman was a nine-year veteran of CBS, one of the most experienced journalists on the network’s flagship news program, but he’d been told at the end of that night’s broadcast that he’d been fired because he was “not sufficiently on board” with the new direction of the show.

The trouble began earlier in the week, when producers watched from the control room as Dokoupil interviewed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The Trump administration had just completed the Maduro raid, and there were unanswered questions about its legality, motivation, and what would happen next in Venezuela after the decapitation of its government. Hegseth dedicated much of the interview to praising President Donald Trump’s “bold and audacious” leadership. Dokoupil hardly pressed the secretary, at one point noting Hegseth’s earlier boast that Maduro “effed around and found out.”

“I was horrified,” recalls one staffer. “Because it was such a softball interview.” But one person seemed to be happy with the display: Kim Harvey, the executive producer, who seemed intent on impressing Weiss. Weiss had personally booked Hegseth, and Dokoupil was delivering the right blend of major access and deferential tone that she wanted for the new show.

Guzman protested, according to a source familiar, telling Harvey that Dokoupil needed to ask tougher questions. “No, no, no,” Harvey said to Guzman, telling him to stay in his lane. (A source close to Harvey disputed this. Guzman declined to comment for this story.) Within days, Guzman was gone. This weekend, Hegseth will sit at a table with CBS News leadership as a guest of the network at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual black-tie gala fêting the press.

Internally, much of the blame for the show’s troubles has been laid on Weiss, a television neophyte who has pursued aggressive changes in an effort to modernize the newsroom and reshape its coverage. In doing so, she’s hired controversial contributors and brought staffers over from The Free Press with no experience in broadcast. When the new show first launched, “nobody knew what the hell they were doing,” an Evening News veteran says. “Nobody had the courtesy to come in and say, ‘So we’re the new guys. How do you do this?’” Weiss tapped Sascha Seinfeld, a Free Press staffer, to write for the Evening News, raising eyebrows in the newsroom. “Being Jerry Seinfeld’s daughter does not make one a skilled TV news writer,” the correspondent says. Seinfeld has since left CBS and returned to The Free Press.

The night after the start of the war in Iran, Dokoupil interviewed Douglas Murray, a conservative commentator known for his vigorous defenses of Israel. “We’ve started to see more opinion commentators coming in to talk about what they think about what’s going on versus showing and telling from reporters,” the CBS journalist says. Meanwhile, the daily editorial calls now often feature analysis from Aaron MacLean, a former adviser to Senator Tom Cotton who recently joined CBS News as an analyst. In an October piece for The Free Press, he called for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

For some at the network, these personnel moves suggest Weiss is overseeing a kind of personalist regime. “We’re all in this weird situation where we’re looking at this woman and all of us agree that she’s not remotely qualified for this job,” the correspondent says. “All of us agree that she’s an ideologue with an ideology that she invented herself, and we’re sort of left here trying to psychoanalyze her and make sense of her and try to find motivation and understanding. And it’s fucking crazy!”

Others see all the angst around Weiss as a little hysterical. One reporter who’s fond of her calls it “Bari derangement syndrome.” To her defenders inside CBS, she’s a well-meaning if naive liberal whose errors are borne more out of inexperience than malice. She may have been out of place amid the progressive paroxysm that engulfed The New York Times in 2020, but she’s hardly MAGA. The CBS journalist tells me that Weiss often praises teams for tough coverage of the Trump administration, and has described certain Trump policies as “insane.”

There might be a little “Tony derangement syndrome” at play as well. The clips that have gone painfully viral belie the reality that the Evening News, on any given night, is a fairly anodyne broadcast. A recent episode mixed straightforward reports on airport delays and the Iran war with some elder-millennial cringe. During a segment on the death of Chuck Norris, Dokoupil reported the late action star inspired “some of the funniest memes on social media,” including: “When Chuck Norris slices onions, the onions cry.”

Even as Weiss—whom the former executive described as “booker in chief” at the network—has managed to land major interviews for the Evening News, Dokoupil has continued to face criticism for his kid-glove questioning of the powerful. When Dokoupil conducted a gentle interview with Netanyahu last October, producers were surprised by his deferential attitude to the Israeli prime minister when the cameras weren’t live. At one point, according to a former staffer who watched the footage, Dokoupil started “bragging” to Netanyahu about his relationship with Weiss. Netanyahu didn’t seem to care. “Bibi didn’t give a shit about Bari Weiss,” a CBS source says. “He was just like, ‘Okay, whatever.’” (CBS News disputed this characterization.)

There was one recent moment of competitive success for the show. After the United States joined Israel in striking Iran, CBS News moved quickly to get Dokoupil to the region to cover the war on the ground. He caught one of the last commercial flights from New York to Amman, Jordan, landing just hours before the airspace shut down. According to CBS, Dokoupil was the only network anchor to report live from the region as he delivered a nightly narrative of the war.

Even then, his internal detractors remain. “He was very clearly reporting this through the lens of Israel,” says the correspondent, describing a drastic shift from the kind of journalism the Evening News used to deliver. “We are just parroting Israeli talking points and being deeply incurious about anything else outside the echo chamber Bari and Tony Dokoupil happen to live in.”

The new anchor returned to New York to a harsh reality. The week after his trip, the Evening News reportedly averaged just 3.8 million viewers, a considerable drop from his first week in the anchor chair and below a dreaded threshold that spelled the end of his predecessors’ careers. The ratings last month were similarly grim: According to Nielsen, the show saw its lowest-rated March this century. “There’s a lot of pressure on him,” says the former CBS executive. “Nobody thought [the ratings] could fall any further. Oh! Look, there we did.” (A CBS spokesperson told Vanity Fair that ratings have been up over the last three weeks compared to this time last year.)

The show lost more ground to ABC and NBC News, and at the cost of more than just pride: One broadcast insider explains that every percentage point of share that a network loses to the competition represents roughly $10 million in annual losses. In the first quarter of 2026, according to numbers obtained by Vanity Fair, the Evening News lost three points of share from the first quarter of 2025.

“They tried to overcorrect against their audience too quickly,” the agent says. “The audience they’re trying to capture, I don’t think it’s ever going to go to CBS because either they’re with Fox or they’re out in the fractured digital ecosystem. They’re not going to start watching CBS because their editorial aperture changes to the right by 10%.”

One current CBS executive argues Dokoupil had an uphill climb at the start of his tenure given the ratings lows of the previous iteration of the show, and the new Evening News is performing better in some smaller markets. Wade Deaver, a media executive who runs two CBS affiliates in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, recommended to Weiss that she tap Dokoupil for the role in October of last year. He says he’s been impressed by the numbers. “The show is in the best place that it’s been in over a year,” Deaver tells Vanity Fair. “Tony Dokoupil is resonating with Middle America.”

Despite the overall decline, insiders at the network feel Dokoupil has a long leash. “CBS doesn’t really have a choice right now,” the former executive says. “They’ve got to keep him in the chair, because they have gone through anchors faster than postmen go through shoes.”

Weiss has argued that CBS needs to broaden its appeal to more Americans, specifically conservatives and Trump supporters who have tuned out traditional news outlets. But if the thesis that liberal bias is what drives Americans away from broadcast news turns out to be wrong, that misdiagnosis could induce a vicious spiral in which CBS alienates the audience they already have in pursuit of one that does not exist.

The question is whether Weiss is actually interested in preserving the audience, or if she sees her stewardship of the network as an ideological project for which ratings declines will be sustained without protest by the deep pockets of her benefactors. Dokoupil himself is clearly proud of the lineage he is now a part of: He’s brought back an audio bed from Dan Rather’s tenure as well as an old CBS anchor desk to sit behind. Weiss might see them as the spoils of war.

This article appears in Party Animals, a weekly dispatch on politics, power, and society in the nation’s capital.

This story has been updated.