MSNBC's Tony Dokoupil acted more like a left-wing environmentalist than a journalist on Saturday's Weekends With Alex Witt, as he reported on the Paris climate change talks. Dokoupil trumpeted how "it's really like a Mars lander kind of moment — a NASA moonshot moment." The correspondent later touted how "history will be made" if the talks conclude successfully, and added, "I can't wait to see how it turns out, because there's going to be celebration if it's successful; and there could really be rioting in the streets here if it fails."
Tony Dokoupil


In the wake of the ongoing controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s diesel car emissions controversy, MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil wildly proclaimed that Republican politicians were cheering on the German car maker for deceiving the Environmental Protection Agency. Dokoupil appeared on All In with Chris Hayes Tuesday night and insisted that “[i]f you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far on stuff like this, this is almost like a heroic act by Volkswagen.”
On MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts Monday afternoon, environmental reporter Tony Dokoupil described the Environmental Protection Agency causing three million gallons of toxic waste to spill into a Colorado river as “good intentions leading to a bad outcome.” He explained: “This mine has been leaking sludge for a long time and EPA was on the scene in hopes of cleaning it up.”
"To survive in a hostile world, guys need to embrace girly jobs and dirty diapers," argued the Newsweek writers Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil in the subheadline of their September 20 article "Men's Lib."
The writers set out to explain "[w]hy it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home."
If American men want to be competitive in a global economy, they argued, they need to suck it up and get comfortable with the idea of working traditionally "girly jobs" and/or being stay at home dads:
It’s possible to imagine protectionist trade and immigration policies boosting blue-collar employment at the margins. But the U.S. can’t stop globalization. If male morale—and the American economy—are ever going to recover, the truth is that the next generation of Homer Simpsons will have to stop searching for outsourced manufacturing jobs and start working toward teaching, nursing, or social-service positions instead.
Fair enough. But Romano and Dokoupil also cast their gaze across the Atlantic, arguing America needs public policies that emulate European countries on paid parental leave, particularly paid paternal leave (emphasis mine):
Tony Dokoupil, who once asked "is journalism ready for a black president" in the Columbia Journalism Review -- he also excerpted it in a blog entry at Huffington Post -- gave Newsweek readers a look at what the presidential candidates' neckties say about the men who wear them.
You may scoff now, but Dokoupil sure finds it a knotty problem (emphases mine):
So what does the knot say about today's presidential candidates? In McCain's case, it screams old-guard Washington establishment, like a bolo screams cowboy. According to his top adviser, Mark Salter, the Arizona senator wears his tie with either a Windsor or the related half-Windsor knot--a configuration long favored by Beltway elites and, at least judging by the photos, nearly every U.S. president in the 20th century.... McCain's Windsor might seem like an odd choice for a self-proclaimed maverick, but it reflects the senator's public struggle to remain true to himself despite the distorting pressure of the presidential campaign. [...]
