Right-wingers being pandered to by the MAGA-curious CBS boss Bari Weiss are rejecting the network’s new primetime host.
Sean Spicer, a former press secretary to President Donald Trump, has dismissed CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s efforts to market himself as a media outsider, suggesting MAGA will not embrace him—no matter how hard he and Weiss try.
Dokoupil, 45, told viewers last week that the mainstream media has repeatedly “missed the story” and that he relates to everyday Americans who feel legacy media has failed to “reflect” their lived experiences.
Spicer scoffed at that claim. He said the anchor, who is married to the MS Now correspondent Katy Tur, is “part of the problem.”
“You gotta go back to what he said, ‘I was you.’ No, dude, you were the problem,” Spicer said on his podcast, The Huddle. “This isn’t some—you know, guy that was there was shouting from the rooftop. Tony is the problem, and for him to gaslight us and act like he was somehow that understands and identifies with is total B.S.”
An incensed Spicer, 54, continued, “He sat around on the round table on their morning show and was part of the problem. For him to gaslight the American people and act like somehow he is one of the saviors of the movement is ridiculous. If he had sat back and said, ‘I was part of the problem,’ as opposed to, ‘I was you,’ I could at least buy it. But this is so ridiculous.”
CBS did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Dokoupil was educated at the now $53,000-a-year Gulliver Preparatory School in Miami as a child. He then studied business at George Washington University in the nation’s capital, graduating first in his class, and then attended graduate school at Columbia University. His first media gigs were at Newsweek and the Daily Beast before he joined NBC News in 2013 and CBS News in 2016. He and Tur live together in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive enclaves.
That résumé hardly makes him an outsider in the mainstream media space. That is perhaps why the right-wing host Megyn Kelly, like Spicer, is skeptical that he can win over disillusioned CBS viewers in the heartland.
“Where was he standing up for people who were in the independent lane trying to tell the truth about media, about government, about the Biden administration?” she said on The Megyn Kelly Show on Monday.
She continued, “I don’t remember you, Tony, so I find this utter bulls–t condescension, and I do believe it will f–king fail, as all these networks are failing because the audience has caught on to their bulls–t.”
Kelly, 55, is herself an alum of Fox News and NBC News, which fired her in 2019 over remarks she made about blackface. She said Weiss’s attempt to revamp CBS Evening News—something that got off to a rocky start on Monday but included plenty of MAGA talking points, including interviews with Venezuelans who support U.S. control of the country and an expert who said that average gas prices are down a quarter from this time last year—will ultimately be a bust.
“It’s going to fail. CBS Evening News will fail,” Kelly said. “CBS will not be turned around by Bari Weiss or anybody else. I’m sorry, but its days have passed. CBS was never, for the past two decades, seriously in the running for dominance in the morning or the evening or any place else in the lineup.”
She added, “CBS News has not been relevant for forever, and it doesn’t matter who they put in the evening news chair or how late in the game they’ve realized that none of us trusts or, more importantly, needs them anymore.”
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