CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil got dissed in a Vanity Fair story filled with putdowns about the anchor from unnamed current and former colleagues.
Dokoupil got the job in the perceived Trumpification of the “Tiffany Network” under conservative Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss.
Since Dokoupil took over “CBS Evening News” in January, the ratings have improved a bit over previous co-anchors Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson. But they’re falling of late, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Meanwhile, the scrutiny of Dokoupil doesn’t appear to be letting up, at least not in Aidan McLaughlin’s Vanity Fair piece that dropped Thursday.
Read the full story at Vanity Fair.
Here are some of the most damning remarks about Dokoupil in the piece.
“He’s deeply lacking in self-awareness,” one current CBS correspondent said.
“You just have to be good eye candy, and he was good eye candy,” said a former producer who worked closely with the newsman. “Tony has the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with. And they’re filled with it, because they’re all full of vanity. But Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”
“He very much was not Bari’s first choice,” one correspondent said. “He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the fucking job. I mean, she wanted Bret Baier. She wanted Anderson Cooper. She wanted a name, and she does not see Tony Dokoupil as a name. A useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”
“This is what happens when you get somebody who’s only ever worked on a morning show, where he just thinks, ‘Oh yeah, why don’t we dedicate two minutes of this 19-minute broadcast to glazing Marco fucking Rubio?’” a CBS journalist told the magazine. The reference was to a fawning segment about the secretary of state, which Dokoupil capped with the line, “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You are the ultimate Florida man.”
This came after a shaky start in his first newscast in which the host wrestled with technical glitches. He also raised eyebrows by calling President Donald Trump’s rambling State of the Union screed “extraordinary.”
CBS defended Dokoupil as an “exceptional talent” in a statement to VF: “While Vanity Fair’s unnamed sources continue to peddle old and false rumors, that won’t stop Tony and his team from doing what they do best: reporting the news and telling the truth.”
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