CBS “Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil is being portrayed as a “useful idiot” who landed the top job because he is “good eye candy” and was boss Bari Weiss’s “seventh or eighth choice,” according to a brutal new report.
More than a dozen current and former staffers at the Tiffany Network’s news division, speaking anonymously to Vanity Fair, blasted Dokoupil’s rapid rise and questioned whether he is equipped to lead the struggling broadcast.
“Tony has the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with,” a former producer who worked with Dokoupil told Vanity Fair, noting his view that Dokoupil is out of his depth.
“And they’re filled with it, because they’re all full of vanity. But Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”
The report claimed that Dokoupil’s position was undercut from the outset, with insiders telling Vanity Fair that Bari Weiss had initially pursued bigger marquee names — including Bret Baier and Anderson Cooper — before ultimately landing on him after those efforts fell through.
One industry source said Weiss “called everyone on planet Earth,” reinforcing the perception inside CBS that Dokoupil was not the first-choice hire but a fallback option, a dynamic that has shadowed his tenure from day one.
Weiss further undermined her star anchor after she personally intervened in the script during his very first broadcast — an unusual move that backfired when her edits were mistakenly inserted twice into the teleprompter, according to Vanity Fair.
The duplication left Dokoupil visibly flustered on-air, stumbling through the segment before telling viewers, “First day, big problems here,” in an awkward debut that set the tone for his tenure.
CBS News disputes that characterization.
CBS News backed Dokoupil, telling The Post: “Tony Dokoupil is an exceptional talent and experienced journalist who continues to build a program designed to reach audiences wherever they consume the news. 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.”
Dokoupil also drew ridicule inside the newsroom for a segment in which he devoted airtime to praising Marco Rubio, signing off with a line that critics blasted as fawning.
One CBS journalist told Vanity Fair the moment amounted to “glazing Marco f–king Rubio,” calling it “outrageous” and arguing it alienated viewers while underscoring concerns about the anchor’s judgment and editorial tone.
The unnamed producer who spoke to Vanity Fair added that Dokoupil’s rapid rise from weekend news to “CBS This Morning” co-host is largely due to the fact that he has good looks.
“TV is superficial and it’s fake,” the producer told Vanity Fair.
“You just have to be good eye candy, and he was good eye candy. He had a good chunk of hair on his head, and he’s better looking than [former “Evening News” co-anchor] John Dickerson.”
Dokoupil has also been slammed by insiders as little more than a pawn in the network’s overhaul, with one CBS correspondent telling Vanity Fair that he was “a useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”
Dokoupil has struggled to lift “CBS Evening News” out of third place, with the broadcast repeatedly failing to crack the key 4 million–viewer threshold that has long been seen as a baseline for competitiveness in the evening news race. \
The show continues to trail far behind rivals on “ABC World News Tonight” and “NBC Nightly News.”
Still, there are modest signs of stabilization.
Nielsen data shows the Dokoupil-led broadcast has ticked up in total viewers over the past three weeks compared to its predecessor last year, suggesting some incremental audience gains even as it remains well below its competitors.
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