New CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has sparked a fresh wave of ridicule after a cringeworthy segment in which he started crying on air.
The MAGA-coded host, whose career under the network’s new right-wing boss, Bari Weiss, has already gotten off to a disastrous start, was being interviewed in South Florida as part of his “Live From America Tour” to commemorate his first week in the role.
The segment soon took an embarrassing turn as Dokoupil wiped away tears while explaining why he loves coming back to Miami so much.
“It makes me emotional, it’s so funny,” Dokoupil said, later asking to “let me get a second here” as he composed himself.
“To help people understand why I have such a reaction,” he added, before pausing for dramatic effect. “Florida is where I grew up. My grandmother’s here, my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, cousins, and it’s where I would have spent all of my childhood, but we left because my father got in trouble with business. We laugh about it now, but he was a drug dealer and he went to jail.”
“The reason it’s so emotional for me is because I feel like I was robbed of the full Miami experience,” he added.
Some viewers didn’t buy the sob story, however, and questioned why the anchor of CBS News’ flagship evening broadcast would present himself on air in such a manner.
“This ‘oh shucks’ schtick is exhausting,” Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that analyzes online extremism, posted on X. “You’re the new face of a global newsroom, not a kid whose dad brought him along to work.”
David Sirota, editor-in-chief of investigative news outlet The Lever, wrote: “The most famous scene in Broadcast News was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a guidebook…the media industry is now literally a satirical movie.” Sirota shared a clip from the 1987 film in which a recently hired news anchor is found to have staged himself crying during a segment where he interviewed a rape victim.
A veteran communications expert with a background in media also trashed the segment, writing on X: “When the anchor loves to be the center of the evening news.
“If you want to make a magazine show, put this production under the CBS entertainment division and give us back Jericka Duncan or Weijia Jiang calmly presenting us good reporting gathered by your best field reporters.”
Elsewhere, Ben Meiselas, founder of the left-leaning media company MeidasTouch, bluntly posted: “Pull it together man.”
This is not the only embarrassing moment of Dokoupil’s foray into evening news. The host, who aspires to be more revered than CBS News’ legendary anchor Walter Cronkite, struggled to read a teleprompter and then failed to figure out which segment he was supposed to be presenting on his first night hosting the broadcast on Monday.
He followed up his shaky start with another cringe-inducing moment Tuesday, when he heaped praise on the “many lives and many jobs” of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The anchor ended the segment—which featured AI-generated images of Rubio in multiple roles, including prime minister of Greenland and head of Hilton Hotels—with: “Marco Rubio: we salute you. You are the ultimate Florida man.”
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment.
The post MAGA-Coded CBS Anchor Mocked for Bizarre Crying Segment appeared first on The Daily Beast.
