A deep dive into the controversial and high-profile anchor’s approach to journalism, Trump, Israel, and the fallout in the CBS newsroom. His interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared to change the trajectory of Dokoupil’s career, and of CBS News.
By Justin Baragona, Reposted from Zeteo, April 28, 2026
For years, Tony Dokoupil was a run-of-the-mill morning talk show host who had yet to make an indelible impression on television audiences.
And then came his explosive and combative September 2024 interview with celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which paved the way for Dokoupil to become the face of CBS News’s flagship nightly news program and the spiritual successor to Walter Cronkite just a year later.
“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil accusingly declared during the ‘CBS Mornings’ conversation.
It was that moment that everything appeared to change for Dokoupil.
Prior to that seven-minute segment in the fall of 2024, Dokoupil had been almost a non-entity, despite having spent five years as a co-anchor of a broadcast morning talk show. Suggesting that one of America’s preeminent thought leaders is an antisemitic terrorist, however, seemed to set off a series of events that possibly led to self-avowed “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss running the network and Dokoupil leading ‘CBS Evening News.’
Still, while the Coates interview proved to be a seismic shift, Dokoupil’s current and former colleagues tell me they were caught off guard at the time by the level of vitriol he showed in that moment.
“I was absolutely gobsmacked, and it did not comport with anything I recall about Tony being ideological. I never saw him being ideological in any way. That interview came straight out of the blue,” Joy Reid, who worked with Dokoupil at MSNBC, told me.
The intense and pointed nature of the questions to Coates, which saw Dokoupil ask the author what “so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state” and if he just didn’t believe Israel “has a right to exist,” apparently sparked murmurs within CBS News about Dokoupil’s possible connections to conservative pro-Israel groups and activists.
Three well-placed CBS News sources said there was internal speculation in the newsroom about whether pro-Israel advocacy groups such as the ADL had begun communicating with Dokoupil to build a relationship with the anchor following the October 7 attacks, though no evidence of editorial coordination has been established.
Two sources familiar with the matter told me that Noa Tishby, an Israeli actress and outspoken activist who once served as the Israeli government’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, met with Dokoupil.
The ADL denied that the organization had privately met with Dokoupil in recent years. Representatives for Tishby did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
CBS News did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether Dokoupil met with Tishby. A CBS News spokesperson had previously told Zeteo when reached for comment on this story that, “This whole screed reads like it was written in crayon on the back of a paper placemat. It’s entirely fabricated lies. Just like all of Zeteo’s ‘coverage’ of CBS News.”
That Dokoupil went from the controversy-sparking Coates interview to CBS News’s top anchor chair in little more than a year is not so much about the standard machinations of network newsrooms. Instead, this is a story, based on conversations with 11 people who have known him through the years, about what they say is a “mediocre” but “good-looking white guy” who has continually “failed upwards,” only to eventually hit pay dirt by defending Israel, saluting Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, and finding the one benefactor who would take him to the top – Bari Weiss. It’s also a behind-the-scenes account, based on multiple well-placed sources, of a newsroom divided over Dokoupil’s new status and journalistic approach.
A Conversion and a Circumcision
Growing up in Miami, Dokoupil lived a life of luxury – including a nice house, private school, yacht, and expensive vacations in the Caribbean. That was because his father – known as “Big Tony” – was a drug smuggler, something Dokoupil wrote about at length in his 2014 autobiographical tale The Last Pirate and recounted during a ‘CBS Evening News’ telecast from Miami this year.
According to Dokoupil, the lavish lifestyle dried up before he was 10 years old as his father’s drug addiction spiraled out of control and legal troubles loomed, which eventually saw “Big Tony” skip town. Dokoupil and his mother, a retired schoolteacher, then relocated to Maryland.
“I felt like my world was cracked in two… There was a before, when anything was possible, all doors were open. And there was an after, where you had to scrimp,” Dokoupil noted in a 2009 feature about reconnecting with his father.
After graduating from high school in Severna Park, Maryland, Dokoupil earned a scholarship to play baseball at George Washington University (GWU), where he would go on to graduate first in his class from GWU’s business school. Journalism, at that point, was nowhere on his radar.
“At the time, I didn’t know what journalism was,” Dokoupil told the Severna Park Voice newspaper in 2019. “I thought I was going to do something in athletics.”
In fact, as recently noted by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Dokoupil was also a part-time hair model before he fully embarked on a career in journalism. “Tony has a great head of hair,” former Newsweek colleague Jessica Bennett told CJR. “We used to mock him for being too pretty for print.”
It was while he was in a PhD program at Columbia University that he decided to take an unpaid internship at Newsweek, which led to his first job as a journalist.
“I stayed through the great collapse of print – all the layoffs, the bails, the hand wringing, all the convulsion,” Dokoupil recalled. “I ended up in TV because I had done a number of stories for Newsweek that became broadcast in one form or another.”
After spending six years with Newsweek (which briefly merged with The Daily Beast during his tenure), Dokoupil joined NBC News as a senior writer for its digital division in 2013 before the enterprise unit he worked for shut down. He later shifted to reporting for NBC’s off-camera investigative unit before becoming an MSNBC correspondent, which would eventually lead to some on-air appearances.
He converted to Judaism in 2008 while engaged to his first wife, Danielle Haas. The couple would have two children, and Dokoupil would later write about his experience getting an adult circumcision in order to complete his conversion.
“Medically speaking, I was already circumcised, along with most of the other babies born in America in the Eighties. But that’s no good for God. I needed a hatafat dam brit: a drawing of blood,” he detailed in a New Republic piece in 2014.
Haas eventually filed for divorce in 2015 and moved the couple’s children to Israel, which Dokoupil revealed on air shortly after the October 7 attacks in Israel. The same year he split from Haas, Dokoupil began dating MSNBC correspondent Katy Tur. Two years later, the couple would elope, and they now have two children of their own.
Unremarkable and Unmemorable
During his time at NBC News and MSNBC, Dokoupil was always compared to fellow correspondent Jacob Soboroff, according to three former MSNBC staffers I spoke with.
“He didn’t make much of an impression during his time at MSNBC. Was often compared to Jacob Soboroff, who came up around the same time, so he stopped wearing glasses to help differentiate himself,” an ex-NBC News executive told me. “Barely appeared on air, unlike Soboroff. I always thought he was sort of like a chameleon.”
Another former MSNBC journalist quipped that network employees used to joke that Dokoupil was the “himbo” version of Soboroff.
As others pointed out, Dokoupil didn’t get much airtime throughout his tenure at MSNBC and NBC News, and he struggled to stand out during his years at the network. “I literally remember nothing about his journalism because it was so unremarkable that it really wasn’t memorable,” the ex-MSNBC journalist noted.
Still, the ex-MSNBC journalist described Dokoupil as “quite a nice guy” and a “perfectly lovely person” during their shared tenure at the network, adding that they even had “a couple of conversations here and there about his very interesting family” history.
Dokoupil did make an impression on Tur, who told Esquire that she met her future husband in the makeup room in 2015 prior to an appearance on Al Sharpton’s show.
“I’m not very polite, so I said, ‘Who the fuck is that? Does he work here? How come I don’t know who he is?’” Tur recounted to Esquire in 2019. “The makeup artists all chimed in and said, ‘That’s Tony, we’ve all got a big crush on him.’”
While Tur’s career exploded during the 2016 presidential campaign, leading to her becoming an on-air anchor following her work covering Donald Trump on the trail, Dokoupil still found himself stuck in neutral at MSNBC.
Then CBS News came calling, and he moved to the Tiffany Network as a correspondent during the heat of the 2016 political season.
A ‘Good-Looking White Guy’ Is Handed a ‘Silver Platter’
Much like at MSNBC, though, Dokoupil found himself struggling to make a name for himself in his first couple of years at CBS News. As several former and current CBS News staffers told me, Dokoupil was largely relegated to weekend segments and “bottom of the barrel” stories.
“He didn’t know how to write for TV. He didn’t know how to do any of that kind of stuff. He was just, you know, a good-looking white guy,” a former CBS News producer said.
Multiple sources noted that ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ showrunner Rand Morrison “kind of put Tony on the map” by utilizing him for several segments on the long-running weekend staple.
Still, Dokoupil’s on-air hits were few and far between, so it was unexpected to nearly everyone – including Dokoupil himself – when then-CBS News president Susan Zirinsky tapped him to be the third anchor on ‘CBS Mornings’ in 2019. Particularly since Dokoupil had never even guest-anchored or hosted a news show up until that point.
“He had almost zero experience, like he started in the big leagues,” a network staffer stated. “Yeah, that’s the thing that you have to know about Tony. He did not pay his dues, as we call it in our television news business; you’re supposed to climb your way through the ranks.”
The same staffer recounted a conversation they had with Zirinsky around the time she decided to elevate Dokoupil from relative obscurity to morning show host.
“They plucked him out and gave him an opportunity on a silver platter, and he said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And she said, ‘We will carry you.’ Can you believe that privilege? Yeah, it was stunning, and the fact that she shared that story with me was stunning,” the staffer declared.
“He’s literally the William Hurt character from the movie ‘Broadcast News.’ Because you know that the character that Holly Hunter plays is based on Susan Zirinsky,” the staffer added.
Outside of CBS News’s blanket denial of Zeteo’s reporting, Zirinsky herself did not respond to a request for comment.
Dokoupil’s sudden promotion to morning anchor prompted other former and current CBS News staffers to grouse that he didn’t “earn his stripes” and he had “never anchored before” as he’d “barely done a live shot” prior to his ascendance.
“But that’s the open secret from people who are not sure how he got here in the first place,” a former CBS News correspondent said.
With several CBS News sources describing him as “just another mediocre white guy who failed upwards,” the former producer noted that Dokoupil seemed to develop something of an “imposter syndrome” when he arrived at ‘CBS Mornings’ – which led to him appropriating an arrogant, aloof demeanor as the years went on.
While Dokoupil’s morning cohorts, Nate Burleson and Gayle King, were always warm and personable to their guests and fellow CBS colleagues, according to several CBS sources, Dokoupil largely came off as “cold” on set.
“To me, Tony’s problem is that he just kind of thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, and that’s like the nexus for everything with him,” one ex-CBS senior staffer pointedly stated. “He’s very much like, ‘I know because I know. This is what I believe, so it must be correct.’ There was a lot of that. And he’s, you know, a bit of a poser, but he wouldn’t be the first one.”
Still, other former CBS colleagues noted that Dokoupil had grown into his role on ‘CBS Mornings’ over time, applauding him for his deft interviewing of tough subjects, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“He did a good job pressing her and not giving her an open platform to say what she wanted to say,” the ex-correspondent said. “He did that well. I thought that actually raised his standing a little bit internally.”
The Coates Interview Controversy
While Dokoupil had largely steered clear of displaying any ideological stances throughout his news career, that all changed after the October 7 attacks in Israel and the start of the genocide in Gaza.
The Monday after the attacks by Hamas, Dokoupil told ‘CBS Mornings’ viewers that his children and ex-wife were in Israel. “I come to this fairly as a journalist, but I’m also a father,” Dokoupil said, before adding: “You can’t separate those two at a certain point.”
“We’re talking about the direct, close-range murder of more than 700 civilians in their cars, in their homes, at a festival,” he continued. “And then the kidnappings, and then the hostage taking, and then the evidence of rape. And I think there’s enough moral clarity in the world to say that this is wrong, it’s terrorism, and if it’s being done in your name, speak up, speak up.
Several well-placed CBS News sources said that following his emotional on-air remarks about his children, they heard from others that the ADL and other conservative pro-Israel organizations began connecting with Dokoupil.
The former CBS senior staffer said that “I would hear a lot about” pro-Israel organizations meeting with Dokoupil and potentially other CBS journalists, something other sources told me had been talked about within the newsroom. Zeteo has not been able to independently verify any such meetings.
“I was aware that this was just kind of happening,” the ex-senior staffer stated. “I just think that there was a lot of pressure, not just from the outside groups but also from very like-minded people within the network. So there were instances where people had no business speaking with correspondents in the field, like during the war in Israel or Lebanon or wherever, reaching out to them directly.”
The Coates interview, meanwhile, occurred roughly a year after the start of the war in Gaza. And it appeared to change the trajectory of not only Dokoupil’s career, but that of CBS News.
After CBS News management reprimanded Dokoupil for violating the network’s editorial standards during the contentious interview, Weiss and her right-wing pro-Israel site, The Free Press, made the morning host a cause célèbre.
As Weiss obtained leaked recordings of editorial meetings, she devoted copious column space to defending Dokoupil while blasting then-CBS News chief Wendy McMahon for rebuking the anchor’s interview of Coates. At the same time, Dokoupil received support from Shari Redstone, the then-chair of CBS parent company Paramount – and a passionate backer of pro-Israeli causes.
While some of the people I spoke to acknowledged that Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates was “more aggressive” in tone than they would have liked, they still defended it.
“Ta-Nehisi is not coming on just to have a softball interview,” one former senior producer said, adding that the segment “made people think” and “probably brought more attention to the book” in the end.
Meanwhile, ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt quickly spoke with McMahon and made it clear that Dokoupil had done nothing wrong in challenging Coates’s “one sided (sic)” views on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Greenblatt also groused that it was “insensitive” of McMahon to reprimand Dokoupil on October 7, since it was the first anniversary of the Hamas attack.
According to three network sources, McMahon was required to meet with the ADL multiple times, in addition to her initial call with Greenblatt, following the Coates interview. Hours after Greenblatt raged about the “biased and one-sided” nature of a January 2025 ‘60 Minutes’ segment on the Israel-Gaza war, Zirinsky returned to CBS News to serve as interim executive editor overseeing standards.
“Jonathan Greenblatt had two meetings with CBS, and those were in 2024, when he was on a tour that took him to all the major networks for a series of editorial board meetings in response to the campus protests and a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents post Oct. 7,” the ADL told Zeteo. The ADL added that “Tony Dokoupil was not present at either meeting at CBS,” which is not something Zeteo asked the organization to confirm.
McMahon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In the aftermath of the Coates interview, speculation began to swirl internally about Dokoupil’s surprisingly combative approach.
“We always wondered who gave Tony those questions for the Ta-Nehisi Coates interview,” one well-placed CBS News source told me. “And every time we asked, he was like, ‘No, I came up with those.’ I know a bunch of people were like, ‘No, you’re not that smart to come up with those questions.’”
Other network sources I spoke to noted that Dokoupil doing his own research ahead of the interview by seeking out additional context or information from prominent activists or subject matter experts, particularly those who could provide differing opinions and criticism of Coates’s book, should not be seen as a “crazy idea.”
Bari’s Biggest Beneficiary
While Redstone was clearly a staunch defender of Dokoupil, who was now open with his pro-Israel stance, she was also in the process of selling her company to an even bigger supporter of Israel – Skydance Media’s David Ellison and his megawealthy father Larry Ellison, a Trump ally and the biggest private donor to Israel’s military.
As both Redstone and the Ellisons allegedly sought a secret ‘side deal’ with Trump to make sure the merger went through, which saw the settlement of Trump’s “meritless” ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit and pledge to appoint a pro-Trump ombudsman, plans were already being put in place to install Weiss atop the network and integrate her anti-woke blog with CBS News.
The biggest beneficiary of Weiss’s ascension at CBS News would be Dokoupil.
Two months after she was hired, Weiss made Dokoupil the face of her reimagined version of ‘CBS Evening News,’ which saw Dokoupil unveil “five simple principles” that would guide the show moving forward – such as “We Love America!”
Weiss praised Dokoupil at the time, saying in a statement that he was the “person to win” back viewers’ “trust in the media” because “he believes in old-school journalistic values: asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account.”
Dokoupil’s promotion, however, came after Weiss tried desperately to land a big outside hire to jump ship to CBS News, only to repeatedly fail to poach big names such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Fox’s Bret Baier, who both rejected her entreaties and are signed to multi-year deals with their respective networks.
With Dokoupil now a highly polarizing figure both within the newsroom and externally, the criticism of his promotion was fierce and immediate. It didn’t help matters when he kicked off his run as the nightly news anchor by claiming he’d be “more accountable and more transparent” than Cronkite.
“The reason he’s so bad at this is that he’s not actually climbed the ranks in any meaningful way,” a senior CBS News staffer told Zeteo. “He’s not somebody who climbed through the ranks of the newsroom in the way that the rest of the people have, and that is why he will say disparaging or idiotic things about someone like Walter Cronkite.”
Meanwhile, the first weeks of Dokoupil’s run were nothing short of disastrous. Besides taking heat for the program’s “MAGA-coded” coverage, which featured softball interviews with Pete Hegseth and Trump, a “both-sides mess” regarding January 6, an ICE ride-along with now-deposed Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, and a “salute” to Marco Rubio, Dokoupil also found himself struggling to navigate technical glitches and gaffes.
Indeed, on his first official day as ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor, Dokoupil stumbled on air, confused as to whether he was supposed to discuss a story about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. “First day, big problems here,” an embarrassed Dokoupil conceded.
It was later revealed that the reason for the snafu was that Weiss and her aides were still rewriting Dokoupil’s script just minutes before the show went to air, which led to a teleprompter mishap when the rewritten material was added twice.
In fact, according to CBS News insiders and staffers I spoke with, Weiss has been extremely hands-on with the evening news broadcast since installing Dokoupil as its anchor.
“Bari was always on the set and just standing off camera – feeding him lines and saying how she wanted him to act and speak,” one knowledgeable source pointed out. “So it’s just kind of like, if you’re willing to do that – I’m not sure anchors in the past would have been okay with the president of the network leading them around by the nose.”
Weiss also introduced Dokoupil as the face of the network’s flagship nightly telecast with a “road show” that saw him bounce around from city to city via private plane. The behind-the-scenes chaos over the ever-changing logistics stemming from Weiss’s impetuousness resulted in the show spending twice as much as the planned $1.5 million budget for the two-week “Live From America” tour, according to three network sources.
Recently, the program has also seen the loss of over a dozen staffers who took voluntary buyouts offered by Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski amid plummeting staff morale. Additionally, the network axed the program’s number two producer, Javier Guzman, in Dokoupil’s first week for supposedly “undermining” executive producer Kim Harvey.
With the show already in a constant state of flux and disarray three months into his tenure as anchor, some CBS News sources acknowledged that Dokoupil isn’t being placed in the best position to succeed.
“It’s the people that don’t know what the fuck they are doing that are putting Tony in bad situations,” the ex-CBS senior staffer said. “Again, the job of the executive producer, the job of the president of the network, is first and foremost to protect the anchor and protect the brand.”
Dokoupil Flops
Dokoupil was given the anchor’s chair at ‘CBS Evening News’ in part because the two-man experiment the network tried last year – which saw the program hosted by John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois – was drawing weak television ratings.
However, with Weiss running the ship and Dokoupil front and center, viewers are continuing to abandon the show. According to Nielsen, ‘CBS Evening News’ averaged just 4.3 million total viewers in the first quarter of this year, down 7% year-over year. In the key advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54, the drop is even worse – 18%, with a mere 541,000 viewers.
Meanwhile, the network’s broadcast competitors actually saw their ratings shoot up. ABC’s ‘World News Tonight with David Muir’ is up 8% with 8.7 million nightly viewers, while ‘NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas’ averaged 7 million viewers this past quarter, a year-over-year increase of 6%.
In recent weeks, the ratings have only continued to sink. Between April 6 and April 17, ‘CBS Evening News’ wasn’t able to crack 4 million total viewers during any of the 10 weeknight broadcasts – and on three of those nights, the program’s viewership was below 3.6 million.
The rightward shift of both the network and its storied nightly news broadcast is clearly not attracting new audiences while repelling previously loyal viewers. As Status’s Oliver Darcy noted last month, “it is all but impossible for outlets like CBS News to win over any meaningful swath of the Fox News audience.”
It remains to be seen whether Weiss continues to stick with Dokoupil in the long run while keeping the show on its current Trump-friendly path, ratings be damned. Of course, with the Ellisons continuing to pursue their media mogul ambitions by buying up CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, the chances seem likely that the editorial stance of the show – at the very least – won’t shift.
As for whether any of this constitutes good journalism or news reporting on Dokoupil’s or Weiss’s part, the senior CBS News staffer didn’t mince words.
“I don’t think he understands really how to do the job of journalism, because, in a way, he’s never actually had to do it. He’s just been handed these huge jobs that are way, way too big for him, and he’s not smart enough or savvy enough or cares enough about the craft of journalism enough to be good at it,” they stated. “The problem is, it dovetails with Bari Weiss, who doesn’t love journalism, doesn’t care about it, isn’t even curious about it, and only wants to hear her really weird, regressive, narrow, bigoted, whatever you want to call it, views amplified back to her.”
Justin Baragona is Zeteo’s media columnist. He is a former senior media reporter for The Daily Beast & a correspondent for Mediaite.
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