America, meet Tony Dokoupil — just pay little mind to the first impression made on Monday. Actually, only east coast viewers need ignore it.
Dokoupil made his official debut as CBS Evening News anchor on Monday, Jan. 5. It didn’t entirely go to plan. (Dokoupil hopped in the chair early this past weekend to anchor the breaking news coverage of captured Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro, but that wasn’t the planned start.)
Last night, while transitioning topics from Maduro to Sen. Mark Kelly, Dokoupil got caught between stories and without words.
It was the teleprompter’s fault, The Hollywood Reporter is told — queue up your favorite Anchorman meme — the rolling virtual cue card device basically got stuck and discontinued its scroll. Dokoupil thought he was next headed to a story about former VP nominee Tim Walz, but the lineup in the prompter had another idea — as did the graphics prompt, evidently.
Not that Angelenos noticed. CBS News, still in its very early days under Bari Weiss, scrubbed the flub for the streaming broadcast and reshot the segment. Some viewers online noticed (because that’s what online people do). The reshoot was done ahead of the west coast re-broadcast three hours later, a person with knowledge of the production tells THR. The person says this is standard practice when newsrooms experience a technical difficulty, which is what they considered Dokoupil’s on-air fail to be. It is the new, cleaned-up version of the telecast — the west coast’s — that lives on the CBS News website.
Of course, thanks to the internet, nothing really ever goes away either. Author Don Winslow posted video of the moment on X.
“Holy shit! Did you see this? This happened ON AIR,” Winslow captioned the video. “Ladies and gentlemen I give you @bariweiss and the new @CBSNews.”
“To other news now, to Gov. Walz. No, we’re going to do Mark Kelly,” Dokoupil says in the clip of the original broadcast. “First day, big problems here.”
“Are we going to Kelly here? Or are we going to go to Jonah Kaplan?” Dokoupil then asks (to anyone who would listen, I imagine). “We’re doing Mark Kelly, possibly demoted from his retired rank of captain in the Navy.”
Despite the confusion and a few long seconds of silence, Dokoupil stayed pretty cool in the moment. In the west coast and streaming feeds, he comes over extremely cool.
At around the 14:05 mark in the cleaner version, Dokoupil transitions seamlessly to the Sen. Kelly issue.
The moment could serve as a bit of a metaphor for the fresh start for CBS News under its new regime. In addition to a mass exodus of news talent that followed when David Ellison bought and merged Paramount with his Skydance company, Weiss has made headlines for yanking a 60 Minutes story about the experiences of Venezuelans deported to an El Salvador prison by the Trump Administration. Ellison and Weiss both lean right of center — or are at least right curious — whereas the former CBS News (like almost any mainstream media organization not named Fox News) slanted left.
Beginning tonight in Miami, Dokoupil begins a gladhanding tour of America, which means CBS Evening News will be filmed live (for the east coast/tape-delayed for the west) in a new studio each night (for a little while, at least). A traveling circus is unlikely to result in fewer technical matters; no matter, we’ll clean ‘em up in post.
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