Tony Dokoupil Is Making 'CBS Evening News' All About Tony Dokoupil

[AStern]

I love how this bozo and his incompetent boss are getting dragged repeatedly....

On Thursday night’s “CBS Evening News” broadcast, its anchor, in his fifth night on the job, strained for a unifying moment of grace.

Reporting from Minneapolis in the aftermath of an ICE agent shooting and killing 37-year-old mother Renée Good, Tony Dokoupil spoke for a bit over 90 seconds, in a garbled word salad that credited, and blamed, both sides of a political issue, if it said anything at all. Dokoupil acknowledged both opposition to ICE and “people who want to see our immigration laws enforced, legally and peacefully and with safety for all.” Calling both pro- and anti-ICE beliefs “deeply American sentiments,” Dokoupil asked viewers to “find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us” and to “make things better and keep things decent.”

For fairness’ sake, I should state that I am not opposed to mutual respect, improving the nation, or the concept of decency. That’s because they’re airy, vague concepts, the kind of thing one says to position oneself as a moral arbiter despite not really having a stance. In attempting to extrapolate a grand statement from a horrifying and distressing news story, Dokoupil found the perfect Dokoupilian angle: Listen to me, even as I say nothing at all. The anchor who promised, as he prepared to launch his and his boss Bari Weiss’ reinvention of the newscast, to outdo Walter Cronkite had, in Minneapolis, a chance to emulate the late anchor. His speech, though, played more like one of Jerry Springer’s “Final Thoughts,” in which the talk-show host vapidly, but with feeling, exhorted his audience to “Take care of yourselves — and each other.”

But then, to go Cronkite mode would require a certain clarity of vision. Dokoupil said nothing other than that someone needs to fix all the problems — or, really, we all do! But he said it with a dudgeon and sense of puffed-up drama that made for a painful mismatch with his lack of substance.

https://variety.com/2026/tv/columns/tony-dokoupil-cbs-evening-news-minneapolis-1236627197/

[Ritabert]

1. Ratings are tanking. I'll never watch it.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. He's looking to become a politician, on both sides of every issue and on no side at all

Guy strikes me as a 24 karat fake everything. Maybe he's perfect for the age of AI, or is deliberately fouling everything up to give himself no place to go but up.

[newdeal2]

4. He will be in the Trump admin in a year or two

No doubt.

[Americanme]

3. Pro-ICE belief is deeply American sentiment?

I see nothing deeply American in trump's secret police beating and killing people. Or even their mission of hunting people. Not American. Not to me.