It was all-but a foregone conclusion that elite, liberal journalists on the “media” beat would be throwing a collective tizzy Tuesday over CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil scoring an interview with President Trump. Over nearly 13 minutes, the two discussed the death of Renee Good, grocery prices immigration operations, Iran, and even the role of automation in working-class jobs at the Ford assembly line (where the interview took place).
Because it was a respectfully but substantive conversation and not a shoutfest, liberal fiends turned into tween girls playing bully at lunch.
Chief among them was Status’s Oliver Darcy, who spent over 1,200 words melting down over the “Dokoupil Dud” and expressed disappointment Dokoupil didn’t seize “a clear opportunity...to demonstrate that he is not a shill for the new MAGA-friendly owner of CBS News, David Ellison, or his new MAGA-friendly boss, Bari Weiss.”
“But instead of holding Trump accountable in a meaningful way or really pressing for real answers to urgent questions, the interview resembled something more akin to a chummy exchange in which Trump was fully in control, allowed to ramble, deflect, and spout nonsense with little resistance,” Darcy screeched.
In essence, Dokoupil failed to scream, shout, pout, and run down Trump in the same vein then-ABC correspondent Terry Moran did last year.
After running through in all-too-short summaries of the topics covered, Darcy insisted the “interview...felt far more at home on Fox News than on the network once led by figures such as Walter Cronkite—whom Dokoupil vowed, in a now-infamous social media post, to best in the job in some respects.”
Darcy gleefully said “the ratings for Dokoupil’s first week...have been, to put it gently, a dud” and leaned into the Nielsen ratings as having fallen “23% year-over-year in both total audiences and the 25-54 demographic” and put that on Dokoupil’s shoulders and not, say, the fact that CBS has been in third place for decades behind ABC and NBC and the last team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois couldn’t even last a year.
“Suffice to say, those numbers are awful. Even if Dokoupil hadn’t declined in the year-over-year numbers, staying flat would be somewhat of a failure given the extraordinary effort that has gone into promoting his first two weeks in the chair. CBS News has chartered a plane to shuttle him across the country, dropping him into a different city nearly every night,” he asserted.
Darcy then turned to anonymous sources to shiv Dokoupil (click “expand”):
“CBS isn’t losing the evening news race, they already lost it, and Bari and Tony are just pretending otherwise,” a veteran television executive told Status. “The total audience is soft, but the demo is a catastrophe. They’re pulling barely half of NBC and ABC in [the 25-54 demo], night after night. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a hospice situation.”
“The audience is ancient, the erosion through the week is brutal, and there’s absolutely no upside,” the executive added. “No spikes, no momentum, nothing. It’s a legacy broadcast in a nutshell—cheap, aging eyeballs with no future. You can slap whatever spin you want on it, but the numbers say the new ‘CBS Evening News’ is dead on arrival.”
A second veteran television executive offered similar analysis, saying they believed the initial numbers to be “very, very bad for CBS” and a “big whiff.”
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Perhaps Weiss is learning that while controversy and “going viral” can generate attention online...bad headlines do not translate into higher ratings in broadcast television. And while the revamped “Evening News” has landed a string of high-profile interviews...it has largely failed to hold those potential newsmakers to proper account...likely alienating quadrants of the CBS News audience, which does not appear especially eager to tune in for gentle sit-downs with powerful figures who are abusing their authority[.]
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CBS News staffers, for their part, don’t want to see it either. Since Dokoupil took over, I’ve repeatedly heard about sinking morale across the newsroom...The reality, however, is that Weiss is doing precisely what Ellison wants: overtly remaking the news division into an outlet friendlier to Trump and his MAGA movement.
On the lack of reach, clips of Dokoupil’s interview were not shown Wednesday on ABC’s Good Morning America or NBC’s Today with both shows sticking to Trump’s social media posts or comments from his speech to the Detroit Economic Club. It was as if they made a collective decision to throttle the reach of a newsmaking interview!
Meanwhile, the folks over at Zeteo — run by Qatar Boy Mehdi Hassan — were beside themselves as well, scoffing at Dokoupil as though he were Nelson from The Simpsons. Peter Rothpletz went as far as to lead the site’s morning newsletter with the headline “Toady Dokoupil” and dedicated part of the subhead to the interview, whining “Bari Weiss’s handpicked CBS puppet royally bungles an interview with Donald Trump.”
Like with the others, the issue Rothpletz had was that Dokoupil chose not scream like a lunatic and conduct a citizen’s arrest.
After huffing “CBS talking head Tony Dokoupil utterly fail[ed] to hold the president accountable for the chaos he’s unleashing,” Rothpletz continued with the insults: “Trump told the heir to the chair of Walter Cronkite, a man whose courage and candor turned the country against the Vietnam War, that he owns him.”
Rothpletz whined about Dokoupil’s reaction to Trump’s closing remark about the economy and arguing “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now” if Kamala Harris had won. In essence, Rothpletz said Dokoupil lacks a manhood:
Dokoupil did not immediately push back, did not immediately defend his honor, did not immediately prove his worth as a broadcast journalist and honest arbiter of truth by telling the most powerful man in the world to pound sand.
No, he proceeded to ask a question about the Ford factory assembly line nearby.
He further screeched that, because of this, “Dokoupil willingly allowed the commander in chief to reap from him, in one fell swoop, both his journalistic integrity and – arguably – his self-respect” and was thus “the single most disastrous, single most embarrassing (albeit entirely predictable) misfortune to yet befall Bari Weiss’s MAGA billionaire-installed reign at CBS News.”
Someone get this guy a fainting couch or at least call his family to ask if he’s okay.
Nevermind that Dokoupil didn’t ask him to sign a MAGA hat or ask him a softball about, say, why Democrats won’t let him make America great again or why the left hates cops.
No, it was unforgivable an interview in which Dokoupil treated the President with respect and thus proof “beyond a shadow of a doubt that America’s ‘Tiffany Network’ is now state-controlled media” and not worth of using “the word ‘interview’ to describe the taping.”
The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr made the Harris remark the focus of his article summarizing the interview, but was able to keep it together and not lose his noodle (because, as he said in a humorous X post ahead of the interview, he loves noodles and wouldn’t want to lose them).
The puerile behavior continued over at The Daily Beast with at least five articles on the “MAGA-coded anchor” in the last 24 hours about the Trump interview.
The pile-on began before it even aired and all the world had was a still shot and a small excerpt about Iran. Josh Fiallo surmised it was proof the two appeared “chummy with each other.” That went alongside a nearly simultaneous article mocking “MAGA-coded” Dokoupil’s first week ratings as a “bloodbath” ahead of his interview with “the ultimate MAGA figure” in Trump.
In a story on the interview itself, Julia Ornedo also focused on the Harris jab (click “expand”):
Tony Dokoupil’s primetime interview with President Donald Trump on Tuesday night went off the rails when his salary suddenly became the topic of conversation.
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But it was Trump’s comment about Dokoupil’s job that stole the spotlight.
The president claimed that the newly minted CBS Evening News anchor probably wouldn’t have a job if Kamala Harris had won the November 2024 election, because the economy would have suffered.
“If she got in, you probably wouldn’t have a job right now. Your boss, who’s an amazing guy, might be bust,” he told Dokoupil, referring to Paramount CEO and Trump pal David Ellison. “You wouldn’t have this job—certainly whatever the hell they’re paying you.”
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Dokoupil made an impassioned plea to viewers as he signed off on Tuesday night.
“You may not agree with everything you hear on this broadcast, but we trust you to listen, and we trust you to decide for yourself,” he said.
A third rolled in thanks to Leigh Kimmins: “MAGA-Coded CBS Anchor Takes the Bait on Height Trolling; Online records suggest that Tony Dokoupil is a mere 5 8, a rumor he is keen to dispel.”
Again, we ask: How old are these people?
But worst of all, Martha McHardy stooped to disgusting lows with the outlet continuing to try and break-up Dokoupil’s marriage to MS NOW host Katy Tur, boasting “Tur is now at the center of her husband’s growing fiasco” and mocked her for having “repeatedly proclaimed her support for him on social media, saying under one much-mocked post, ‘I love this man.’”
McHardy had to bring up the fact that Tur used to date the psychologically unstable Keith Olbermann and suggested he’s an out-of-touch elitist (which is rich considering Dokoupil used to work for...The Daily Beast) (click “expand”):
Tur, 42, married Dokoupil, 45, after meeting in a TV studio make-up room. But now another man she used to love has inserted himself into Dokoupil’s troubled debut: former MSNBC star Keith Olbermann, 66, who was in his late forties when he lived with Tur, then in her early twenties.
“Honestly, @KatyTurNBC - your husband is drowning. Get him the eff out of there,” Olbermann wrote on X.
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS and MS Now for comment.
Tur has publicly supported her husband during his rocky start, commenting on one of his most ridiculed posts—where he was seen breaking and down weeping while talking about his childhood in Miami, where he attended school with Jeb Bush’s and Julio Igliseas’ children—“I love this man.”
She also posted a clip from Dokoupil’s interview with White House Border Czar Tom Homan to her Instagram stories.
Dokoupil, when not on his anti-elite private jet tour of the U.S., shares a three-story townhouse in one of Brooklyn’s most exclusive enclaves with Tur and their two children. He told People magazine he makes her eggs with za’atar and coffee with oat milk every morning.
Olbermann made the intervention after Dokoupil’s 14-minute stand-up interview with President Donald Trump, which attracted criticism for his failure to push back, and after the ratings for his first week in the job showed a massive loss of viewers.
