The technical difficulties that plagued Tony Dokoupil’s debut as CBS Evening News anchor have been blamed on the network’s new right-wing boss rewriting the program’s script just moments before it went live.
The MAGA-coded host’s hopes of making a strong first impression on CBS News’ flagship evening broadcast on Jan. 5 were quickly dashed when he struggled to read from the teleprompter and had no idea which segment he was meant to be presenting.
“First day, big problems here,” an embarrassed Dokoupil told viewers as he began discussing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz while an image of Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly appeared on screen. “Are we going to Kelly here or are we going to go to Jonah Kaplan?” Dokoupil asked the control room, leaving several seconds of excruciating dead air. “We’re doing Mark Kelly,” he eventually continued.
The hiccup was blamed on Bari Weiss, the newly installed editor in chief at the now Donald Trump-friendly CBS News, and her aides, who were still rewriting the CBS Evening News script just moments before the 6:30 p.m. airtime, three sources told The New York Times.
Amid the chaos, material was inadvertently added twice to the teleprompter, prompting a visibly confused Dokoupil to ask on-air what he was supposed to be covering.
The error— which soon went viral and drew mockery of both the revamped Evening News and the network’s new direction under Weiss—prompted immediate recriminations from senior staff who watched the debacle unfold live.
“Mistakes like what happened with the prompter tonight can never happen again,” the show’s executive producer, Kim Harvey, wrote in a scathing 1 a.m. message to staff outlining a “new schedule and process” that would take effect immediately.
“We get 19 minutes (and 30 seconds) every night,” Harvey added, via the Times. “We need to nail it.”
The teleprompter mishap was detailed as part of a broader report examining Weiss’ controversial tenure at CBS News, which has included pulling a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration’s hardline deportation policies.
The Times reported that Weiss instructed producers that she wanted every CBS Evening News broadcast with Dokoupil as host to include “something with viral potential.”
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news,” Weiss wrote. “We need to be the news for these 10 days.”
Unfortunately for Weiss, that wish came true for all the wrong reasons.
The following night after his disastrous evening debut, Dokoupil presented a cringeworthy segment praising the “many lives and many jobs” of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, complete with multiple AI-generated images of the Trump official, before signing off with: “Marco Rubio: we salute you. You are the ultimate Florida man.”
Dokoupil also drew widespread criticism for forcibly crying on camera while recounting how his childhood in Miami was disrupted by the legal troubles of his drug-dealing father.
The anchor—who hopes to be revered in the mold of CBS legend Walter Cronkite—has also ruffled feathers by attacking the news media as being too dominated by “academics or elites” to properly tell stories.
Dokoupil has sought to position himself as separate from the “elite” despite attending the now $53,000-a-year Gulliver Preparatory School in South Florida—whose alumni include Jeb Bush’s children—and later studying at Ivy League Columbia University in Manhattan.
Dokoupil is also married to MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, and the couple lives in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods.
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment.
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