Two days before the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin published on Thursday a nearly 3,800-word gossipy tome filled with anonymous current and former CBS News correspondents and producers trashing editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and “useful idiot” CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, seething over anything and everything already pilloried in past hit pieces (like here, here, here, and here) from other magazines and journalism outfits.
The difference, however, is the soapiness of current CBS News officials attacking Dokoupil as a “vanity”-filled personality who “completely lost the room” when he acknowledged a lack of trust in the press, “parrot[s] Israeli talking points,” a partisan shill for speaking to “conservative commentator” Douglas Murray after the U.S. struck Iran, and seeking analysis from CBS News contributor Aaron MacLean, who previously worked for Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
The subhead served as cry for attention: “With tumbling ratings and savage reviews, the hospital-drama-handsome anchor has hit a rough patch after a meteoric rise at CBS. Insiders are questioning whether he’s up for the job—and panicking at the show’s coziness with the Trump administration. Through it all, Dokoupil has come to represent the Weiss era.”
McLaughlin began with a retread of Dokoupil’s first night, including the script edits that resulted in a mangled teleprompter and has, nearly four months later, proof he and Weiss have no idea what they’re doing.
Boasting this “was an inauspicious start for Dokoupil, a hospital-drama-handsome morning host,” he scoffed that “Dokoupil has presented himself as a relatable face in touch with the country’s problems and an antidote to the partisan politics of an increasingly polarized nation.”
Still stuck in the past, McLaughlin introduced his batch of sources pitching a hissy fit over Dokoupil’s January 1 welcome video conceding Americans have been correct to feel as though the legacy press hasn’t worked for them (click “expand”):
In a video manifesto introducing himself to viewers before the launch of the Evening News, Dokoupil took on a populist tone, criticizing “legacy media” for relying too heavily on “academics or elites.” As Dokoupil recorded that message in the middle of the CBS newsroom, the producer recalls, Weiss was just out of frame, coaching him on his lines.
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 unsurprisingly didn’t participate and were certainly right given the whiny tabloid result. They did, however, fire off a statement blasting Vanity Fair for seeking “unnamed sources...to peddle old and false rumors,” which “won’t stop Tony and his team from...reporting the news and telling the truth.”
The statement was further solidified when, in the same section of the article, McLaughin said the CBS newsroom is “rife with tension,” “paranoia,” and “palpable fear.”
McLaughin further characterized Dokoupil as no more than Weiss’s “vessel for her long-standing criticisms of the legacy media” and mission “to shift CBS a few degrees to the right.”
“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,” he added, using his own industry’s vicious rumor mills to concoct their own feedback loop.
Like with the Columbia Journalism Review piece, McLaughlin had sources who praised Dokoupil’s time at Newsweek, MSNBC, and early days at CBS, but trashed his ascent in three years from correspondent to morning co-host as proof he’s merely “good eye candy,” “the biggest case of imposter syndrome,” and “full of vanity.”
McLaughlin arrived at the infamous September 30, 2024 throwdown with Ta-Neishi Coates in which Dokoupil’s tough questions for one of the secular left’s apostles placed him on dangerously thin ice. This made him an easy fall-back for Weiss at Evening News, making him what one of his on-air colleagues called “a useful idiot” (click “expand”):
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.”
More rehashing of old takes came with Dokoupil’s second day, which featured the Marco Rubio memes segment and news brief on January 6, both unforgivable sins for the Mean Girls mob. Nevermind anything Dokoupil did prior or since. Those two stories were proof he’s distrustful MAGA freak while now-former correspondent Scott MacFarlane is a hero (click “expand”):
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?”
(....)
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.
McLaughlin dug up more January moments, such as Dokoupil’s soft launch episode interviewing Secretary of War Pete Hegesth, which sources felt were too soft. Nevermind past softball interviews Dokoupil’s morning show held with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Jill Biden, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, Susan Rice, or the seemingly endless Michelle Obama interviews to name a few.
Zooming out to Weiss, McLaughin huffed “she’s hired controversial contributors and brought staffers over from The Free Press with no experience in broadcast.” In other words, she’s not doing things the way they’re supposed to be done or hiring they people she’s supposed to.
Then came the whining about MacLean and Murray (photo right) being allowed on, including one on-air correspondent losing their noodle. No word on whether they’re just peachy with appearances by former Obama or Biden officials, such as contributor Samantha Vinograd.
It got worse with a side of arguable anti-Semitism (click “expand”):
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!”
(....)
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.’”
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.”
In between those two excerpts was the only bit of pushback that, on its face, sent this strawman McLaughlin constructed to tumble. He conceded Weiss is “hardly MAGA” and said she’s reported “described certain Trump policies as ‘insane’” while Dokoupil’s newscast is actually “fairly anodyne.”
McLaughlin left readers with the predictable ratings scorn which, to be fair, aren’t great. That said, the newscast has been in third place for at least a generation.
He also left readers with the perfect admission of the elite media being, despite many inside the profession claiming otherwise, decidedly left-wing and any attempt to ensure the rest of the country is felt heard and worked for is not welcome:
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.
