House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries brutally compared watching new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil to tuning into the MAGA TV network run by pillow magnate Mike Lindell.
Jeffries, 55, tore into Dokoupil, 45, on Wednesday for a short segment in which the freshman anchor presented responsibility for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as a matter of partisan disagreement.
“President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of, quote, ‘whitewashing’ it,” Dokoupil said last week, on his second day in the anchor seat handed to him by CBS News’ editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
Jeffries slammed the network’s new primetime anchor for framing the issue as a “both-sides” debate during an appearance on The Jim Acosta Show on Tuesday.
“When I first saw the clip, I was confused. I said, wait, is this Lindell TV? Is this Newsmax, Fox News? What’s going on?” the New York congressman said.
“It turned out to be CBS. It was extraordinary! And rightfully, there’s been a lot of backlash as it relates to trying to both-sides the January 6 violent attack on the Capitol. It’s extraordinary.”
Acosta, 54, a former CNN anchor, chimed in, “It looks as though the Trump propaganda machine is getting bigger, not smaller, in this country.”
LindellTV, the pro-Trump media outlet owned by Lindell—a close ally of Trump—serves up wall-to-wall praise for the president and his circle, alongside election conspiracy theories about voting machines.
CBS Evening News was long considered a bastion of credible broadcast journalism and home to Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America.” But the network is now facing questions about its impartiality following its takeover by Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison.
Ellison, 43, quickly installed Weiss, 41, an anti-woke opinion journalist. She sparked a mutiny among CBS staff last month after she spiked a 60 Minutes report that took a critical look at the El Salvador megaprison where the Trump administration deported Venezuelan men.
Weiss then recruited Dokoupil, who has had a questionable start anchoring CBS’s primetime program.
On Monday, he was caught quoting a claim wrongly made by Trump, 79, as a fact. On Tuesday, his interview with the president at a Michigan Ford factory attracted criticism for his failure to push back.
Trump talked over Dokoupil and made a series of unchecked claims about the economy, while also telling Dokoupil that he wouldn’t have a job if Kamala Harris won the election in 2024.
“You wouldn’t have a job right now. If she got in, you probably wouldn’t have a job right now,” the president told Dokoupil, before calling Ellison an “amazing guy.”
Meanwhile, Dokoupil’s ratings steadily declined over his first four nights since his clumsy debut on Jan. 5, with viewership declining 11.4 percent overall.
CBS News’s PR arm has touted that Dokoupil averaged 4.2 million viewers per night in his first week, “surpassing” the prior season-to-date averages.
But John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who anchored the broadcast before departing the network last month, averaged 4.91 million viewers in their debut week in January 2025, according to Deadline.
CBS said that the Monday broadcast delivered 4.2 million viewers, for a 5 percent increase compared to the 2025–2026 season-to-date averages.
Dokoupil railed against “legacy media” for taking “into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American” and putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
The Miami-raised anchor, who shares a four-floor townhouse in one of Brooklyn’s most exclusive enclaves with his wife—MS NOW anchor Katy Tur—was educated at a $53,000-a-year prep school, and attended George Washington University and Columbia University.
The Daily Beast has reached out to CBS for comment.
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