“CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil’s first broadcast from Taiwan ended in shambles after his cameraman suffered an on-air medical emergency.
The MAGA-coded anchorman was introducing the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping when the camera shot tilted and producers abruptly cut to B-roll footage, reported The Daily Beast.
“Is he okay?” Dokoupil asked after a thud could be heard off camera. “We’re gonna take a quick break, we have an — a medical emergency here. We’re calling a doctor.”
Producers showed more B-roll footage of Chinese landscapes played before cutting to a studio shot of CBS News chief correspondent Matt Gutman.
“So I’m going to sign off for Tony Dokoupil, who’s been reporting in Taiwan,” Gutman told viewers. “We’re going to go to break, we’ll be right back.”
CBS News later confirmed on its X account that the camera operator had suffered a medical emergency during the broadcast and made clear that he was expected to recover.
Dokoupil was broadcasting from Taipei instead of Beijing because the network failed to secure a Chinese visa for the anchor, although it’s not clear whether the lapse was due to a late application or another issue.
Prior to the emergency, the broadcast had been bedeviled by awkward pauses and technical difficulties.
Dokoupil repeatedly fiddled with his earpiece, which led to lengthy pauses during a handoff from White House correspondent Weijia Jiang reporting live from Beijing and after foreign correspondent Anna Coren finished her report.
“Amateur, amateur, amateur hour,” an Emmy-winning network TV executive told the Daily Beast.
The evening news program has seen its rating tumble to just 3.7 million, with only 473,000 average viewers in the closely watched advertising demo of 25-54-year-olds, since conservative pundit Bari Weiss took over as editor-in-chief.
That’s far behind “ABC World News Tonight,” which averaged 8.2 million total viewers and 976,000 in the key demo, and “NBC Nightly News,” which averaged 6.1 million and 903,000, respectively.
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