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On January 3, the night the United States military abducted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and bombed Caracas, Pete Hegseth—the secretary of war, as he likes to be called—sat down for an interview with Tony Dokoupil, who had leaped in to the CBS Evening News anchor chair ahead of schedule to cover the story. Hegseth, in a red, white, and blue tie, took the opportunity to crow, calling the action the “most sophisticated, most complicated, most successful Joint Special Operations raid of all time” and “the best of America.” Dokoupil was attentive. He asked if the administration would seek congressional approval for a full-scale intervention, but did not question the legality of the raid itself. Then he repeated Hegseth’s words from a press conference earlier that day: “I’m gonna say it slow so I get it right,” Dokoupil said. “Maduro effed around and found out.” 

Dokoupil, who is forty-five, had been appointed as anchor in December, months after David Ellison’s Skydance bought Paramount, CBS’s parent company—with financial backing from Ellison’s father, Larry, a founder and the longtime head of Oracle—and installed Bari Weiss as the editor in chief of CBS News. When she took over, Weiss—who as part of her hiring sold Ellison her outlet, The Free Press, for a hundred and fifty million dollars—knocked CBS for being an elitist institution out of touch with the common American. During a staff-wide town hall in January, Weiss said “none of what we want to do is possible” without the trust of the audience; then, by way of explaining how CBS was going to earn that trust, she showed a clip of Dokoupil presenting the news. At the start of his tenure, the Evening News unveiled “five simple principles” to guide the broadcast, including “We love America.” In a promotional video, Dokoupil offered a critique of journalism at large, telling viewers, “We’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you.” In a press release, Kim Harvey, the executive producer of CBS Evening News, said, “Tony’s superpower is listening to people.” 

Dokoupil has other powers of apparent interest to Weiss. One is his familiarity with a subject about which she and the Ellisons care deeply: Israel. Dokoupil’s ex-wife and their two children live in Israel; the Ellisons have donated millions to the Israeli military, and Larry is reportedly close friends with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister; for Weiss, American Zionism is a signature. Before being promoted, Dokoupil was a cohost of CBS This Morning, for which he flew to Israel in October of 2023 to cover the country’s reaction to the Hamas-led attacks of that month and the military response. A year later, in October of 2024, he interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates on This Morning and described his latest book, The Message—in which Coates characterizes Israel as an apartheid state—as something that “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” The segment catalyzed a significant response inside the network, resulting in a review of CBS reporting; Dokoupil’s coverage of Israel, including the Coates interview, raised repeated concerns about falling short of editorial standards, and he was summoned to a meeting with members of the CBS News standards and practices team and the in-house Race and Culture Unit. Externally, Shari Redstone—who was then the CEO of Paramount, aiming to sell to Ellison—declared, “I think Tony did a great job with that interview.”

The sale, of course, went through, thanks in no small part to the approval of the Trump administration. Included in the deal were assurances from Ellison to the Federal Communications Commission that CBS would produce “unbiased journalism” and that “editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.” CBS would dispose of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and hire a new ombudsman to review “any complaints of bias or other concerns”; that role was soon filled by a Trump adviser. Donald Trump announced that Ellison also promised him twenty million dollars in airtime for advertising, public service announcements, and other programming that would advance his interests. There is no record of that in FCC filings; according to the Times, a Skydance lawyer told executives that it was “unmitigated false bullshit.” But Skydance has not publicly denied Trump’s claim. (Paramount Skydance Corporation, as the umbrella company is now known, did not respond to requests for comment.)

In the anchor seat, Dokoupil has since covered the war in Iran by opining that the “iron-fisted theocracy” of the Islamic Republic may be near its demise; when officials confirmed the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he said, “Even as Iran retaliates tonight, that era of repression may be ending.” Dokoupil has cited Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the percentage of arrestees with criminal histories, which “wildly distorted CBS News’ own reporting,” as Media Matters put it. Dokoupil covered the five-year anniversary of the deadly insurrection of January 6, 2021, by briefly noting that Trump “accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of, quote, ‘whitewashing’ it.” In an interview with Trump, Dokoupil pressed him on concerns from his base that his attention was “drifting” overseas but failed to push back on the president’s claim that he’d ended eight wars. Trump told him that if Kamala Harris had been elected, “you wouldn’t have this job.” During a commercial break in Dokoupil’s Venezuela raid interview, Hegseth said to someone off camera that he was sitting down with CBS for “my first mainstream press interview yet at Bari’s request and because CBS News did something right.”

Some journalists at CBS are wincing. A staffer who was not authorized to speak described colleagues feeling irked by Dokoupil’s attempt to position himself to audiences as a critic of mainstream media’s way of doing things: “You are the media,” the staffer said. “Now you got a promotion and you’re gonna talk shit?” In February, Alicia Hastey, a CBS Evening News producer, quit her job and, in a goodbye email, said she felt that the network was now evaluating stories “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.” The Daily Beast, Dokoupil’s former employer, has called him “MAGA coded.” When I reached out to CBS, a spokesperson disputed that Dokoupil or the Evening News was MAGA-coded and shared this statement: “It’s a sad reflection of our current media landscape that Tony and his team’s mission—to deliver trusted journalism to our audience day in and day out—is so controversial. Nothing is going to stop this work, especially narratives not based in reality.” 

Tina Brown, who oversaw Dokoupil at the Daily Beast, told me that he was a “brilliant writer” and “one of our stars: a top-class narrative journalist. I thought it was a huge loss to magazines that he had gone the TV route. But also he was probably going to make a lot more money.” Another CBS staffer who was not authorized to speak told me that Dokoupil has generally been perceived as “professional and smart, if a little cocky and looking to climb,” which is “not unusual for a correspondent.” Since Dokoupil took over as anchor, the staffer said, “people actually feel badly for him.”

Tom Bettag, now a journalism lecturer at the University of Maryland, was a CBS News producer for more than twenty years. From speaking with friends who still work at CBS, Bettag has heard that Dokoupil is “smart,” a “hard worker,” and a “pleasure to work with.” Watching the broadcast, however, Bettag is less impressed—and blames Dokoupil for pulling punches in his interviews with Hegseth and Trump.

But the ultimate problem, in Bettag’s view, has been Weiss’s stewardship. CBS intended to introduce Dokoupil as the new Evening News anchor by taking him on the road for what was called the “Live from America Tour,” yet the breaking story out of Venezuela upended the plan, and he wound up doing his first broadcast, on the raid, from a local station in San Francisco. Bettag didn’t think the lighting setup looked right. “You only get one chance to make a first impression,” he said. “Weiss blew Dokoupil’s chance.”

Still, Dokoupil seems to be striving to unite the nation. Broadcasting the Evening News from Minnesota—where, in the wake of federal agents killing Renee Nicole Good, Dokoupil anchored the show live—he said, “Our job now is maybe the most American thing of all. It’s to find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us, to try to be fair to them. And, in doing so, to make things better and keep things decent because, in America, no one else is going to do it for us.”

While reporting this piece, I reached out to Dokoupil. After a while, he sent me an email. “Some old colleagues said you had reached out,” he wrote. “I really appreciate the interest in my print work.” He said that he’d push for the powers that be at CBS to give us the green light to have an interview. That never came, and a spokesperson declined to give comment beyond the statement, but Dokoupil did volunteer a florid memory from his early days working at Newsweek under Jon Meacham: “I remember when I got promoted to senior writer at the old Newsweek, when Meacham was still editor, I moved my desk to the hallowed culture section, and Jerry Adler—bear of a man, hero of a writer—told me, ‘Welcome to the rest of your career.’ Moments later, or what felt like moments later, Lehman Brothers went under, and print soon followed.”

Dokoupil joined Newsweek in 2006, the last throes of its relevance. (In 2010, Sidney Harman, an audio equipment millionaire, bought the magazine for a dollar.) Jessica Bennett, now a contributing writer at New York magazine, worked there alongside Dokoupil. “Tony has a great head of hair,” she said. “We used to mock him for being too pretty for print.” In fact, prior to his professional journalism career, Dokoupil had stints as a part-time hair model, as well as in public relations. The modeling gig, he would later write, once involved being made up “like an overly sexualized Smurf” and taught him: “I don’t feel comfortable in front of a camera.”

In the early aughts, after college at George Washington University, where he was captain of the baseball team, Dokoupil pursued but did not complete a doctorate in media studies at the Columbia School of Journalism. (He’s said his goal was to become a public intellectual.) While at Columbia, he wrote a column called “Research Report” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he covered, among other subjects, the sad death of the political cartoon. (“Their simple strokes allow complex ideas to bypass the mind and kaboom through the nervous system,” he wrote.) 

He then landed at Newsweek as an assistant editor in the magazine’s front-of-book section, where he and Bennett were “department bitches,” she joked, part of a crew of precocious early-career journalists that also included Samantha Henig, who would go on to create the New York Times’ podcast department, and Sarah Ball, now the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal Magazine. At the time, Bennett said, they were watching Newsweek “implode” around them. At one point, Newsweek lost a National Magazine Award to Golf Digest. “I think Tony’s still recovering from that,” she said, and laughed. They would spend hours having “existential crises” at Barrow’s Pub, down the street from the office. (When I asked Bennett what Dokoupil used to drink, she said she didn’t remember but that she’d ask him. Minutes later she got back to me with his answer: Maker’s Mark.)

Bryan Curtis, now an editor at large at The Ringer, also worked with Dokoupil at Newsweek. “He was wearing slacks and a button-down,” Curtis recalled. “I don’t remember a tie, but you could convince me he had one. And even though we were about the same age, something about Tony seemed more grown up than the rest of us. He dressed more grown up, he was married; he carried himself like a journalistic adult.” As for his presence in the newsroom, Curtis said, “I remember him being pretty quiet. The idea that he would be hosting the Evening News, or even be on television at all, was not something that ever crossed my mind. For him to nod at Bari Weiss’s preferred politics, that doesn’t surprise me. I don’t remember Tony having politics to begin with.”

In 2013, Dokoupil left Newsweek and joined NBC News as a staff writer. A former NBC colleague, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional fallout, remembered him as “so not cut from the same cloth as most nebbishy New York journalists.” He had “strapping” good looks and was formal in conversations, even on text or email: “Very serious. Not a cool guy.” Above all, though, Dokoupil made an impression for the quality of his work. “He was very dogged in his reporting,” the former coworker said. “He had a really good magazine voice. I thought he was gonna become, like, a John Jeremiah Sullivan type. I learned a lot from him on a writerly level. I thought he was so talented. I was jealous. He was such a good writer.”

As for his current gig, the former coworker said, “This whole thing with CBS has been so baffling to me. I always thought he had so much integrity. More than me. I would never think that he would be, like, a mouthpiece for the state. The most charitable explanation I can think of is that he has a lot of admiration for the classic anchors. The uncharitable explanation is that he’s very ambitious.” 

While at NBC, Dokoupil began doing on-camera work. “Tony was smooooth,” another former NBC coworker recalled, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also because of concern for professional repercussions. “He was really watchable. We all recognized it as soon as we saw it. This guy’s got something. And I don’t wanna be too clichéd, but I have to tell you, all the ladies loved him. Couldn’t take their eyes off him. It helps.” The colleague added, “I am surprised that he is pretending to be, if not MAGA-aligned, then somehow sympathetic with that worldview. There was no hint of that whatsoever at NBC.” 

Bennett recalled running into Dokoupil soon after he’d made the move to television, when he was doing grunt work, chasing weather disasters. She remembered him complaining that he had to leave his wife and kids to fly into a hurricane zone, and said something to the effect of “What the fuck am I doing? What did I get myself into?” In addition to the two children from his first marriage, Dokoupil has two with his current partner, Katy Tur, an MS Now correspondent. Of his time at CBS, Bennett said, “He’s a good journalist. I don’t see him as someone just bending over for Bari or anyone else.”

Dokoupil wound up hosting the first official night of his “Live from America Tour” in South Florida, where he spent formative childhood years. “Growing up a bit ramshackle, moving between Florida, Maryland and West Virginia, traveling the country playing high school and college baseball, I learned to love talking to new people,” he said in a press release announcing the itinerary. “As a journalist, I realized there are some things you’ll never understand until you’re standing there with the people in the middle of it.” Dokoupil certainly had an interesting childhood: growing up, he believed his father, Anthony, who was in and out of his life, was a real estate investor. In fact, he had been a high-level marijuana dealer. 

Dokoupil first excavated this history in a Newsweek article that he later adapted into a 2014 book, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana. The book details significant moments from his time growing up: When he was four years old, his father took him to Disney World and left him in a hotel room at night to go out drinking. At Gulliver Academy, the elite private elementary school he attended, Dokoupil was in class with a member of the Bush family, which meant “unsmiling totems of my childhood became Secret Service agents, bearing silent witness as I peed on a fire-ant hill.” His parents paid his tuition in cash, which, he writes, was common at Gulliver during Miami’s cocaine heyday. 

The memoir is saturated in color: His father, high at his kindergarten graduation, recklessly climbing up bleachers to get a photo, “stepping on people’s hands, crushing sunglasses, cracking plastic cups of water.” His father in a fit of rage, on his knees in the living room, “fists poised over the table, glass entirely shattered.” Dokoupil and his father appear later at a rehab center, fishing “from the landscaped banks of a stocked pond while my mother waited in the car, polishing off a Tupperware bowl of homemade pasta.” (Attempts to reach Dokoupil’s father were unsuccessful; in the book, Dokoupil writes that Anthony confirmed the account presented, and told his son, “I would die for you. But I was what I was. I was a scammer and a smuggler and I was a good one. That’s it. That consumed me. I never thought about doing anything else.”)

The book is also remarkably, incessantly overwritten. From page one, Dokoupil slams the gas. “He watched the usual mayday flares streak skyward,” Dokoupil writes of his father at one point, “and, if he is anything like me, he followed a thought in his mind, the one we all have when it’s late and the view is of everything, the one that’s been reverberating in my brain ever since: how the hell did I get here?” (Dokoupil joked about his book’s style in our email exchange: “I don’t think I cut a single adjective.”)

Throughout his career, Dokoupil has displayed an admirable willingness to turn his life into copy. In addition to his hair-modeling story, he’s written about a ceremonial adult circumcision he undertook when converting to Judaism. More recently, in the Evening News chair, he interviewed his mother, Gail, for a segment about grandparenthood. “I find that they give me a sense of purpose,” she told him on air, about her grandchildren. “They energize me more than drive me down.” 

This last instance quickly became an entry into the annals of coverage Dokoupil has generated about himself. (One representative social media comment from an Evening News viewer: “Jesus Christ this is a clown show.”) Other examples include the time he cheered Marco Rubio, the secretary of state: “Marco Rubio, we salute you,” he said. “You’re the ultimate Florida man.” The White House shared the clip on X. There was the time when he cried during an on-air interview with a local CBS affiliate in Miami while reminiscing about his childhood. When he argued on social media that he would be more transparent than Walter Cronkite. When he defended his height. 

Some of this is the stuff of an understandably awkward transition from morning show personality to nightly news anchor. And because his rise has come in the wake of Paramount’s takeover of CBS and Weiss’s arrival, Dokoupil is operating under unique scrutiny. In truth, any given night of the show may look like any bit of generic network television news. Some of his work, such as an interview with Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar, has been well received. Even so, the collective impression does not appear to have won over audiences. Months into Dokoupil’s debut, CBS Evening News has averaged 4.3 million viewers a night, which CBS registers as a slight improvement over the ratings before he started. But recently, the weekly average fell below four million viewers and, according to the latest weekly data, the Evening News places firmly behind the prime-time newscasts at ABC, which has averaged nearly nine million viewers, and NBC, which has averaged close to seven million. (CBS News has ascribed some portion of the ratings trouble to daylight saving time.) Bettag, the former CBS News producer, told me that, based on his experience, a general rule of thumb for television news is that roughly 70 percent of networks’ national news audiences is made up of viewers who stay tuned after their local news broadcasts on affiliate stations. Which may mean that when it comes to boosting the ratings anytime soon, Bettag said, there is “almost nothing” CBS can do. 

But there is control to be had over coverage. Days after the United States and Israel went on the attack in Iran, Dokoupil and his team flew to the Middle East, where they presented the Evening News from both Amman and Tel Aviv, speaking with locals in each city. In one segment, Dokoupil asked a nine-year-old Israeli boy how he copes with fear during the war; in another, he chatted with a brigadier general who serves as the Israeli military’s chief spokesperson, as both sat casually on top of wooden desks. Dokoupil also conducted a full-length interview with Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, which was shared via CBS’s social media accounts.

Herzog’s role is largely ceremonial—Benjamin Netanyahu is in charge—but he does hold immense power: as president, he can decide whether to pardon Netanyahu on the corruption charges he currently faces. Both Trump and Netanyahu have publicly and repeatedly called on Herzog to do so. (According to Haaretz, at one point in this yearslong legal saga, Larry Ellison helped Netanyahu secure legal representation.) Critics of Netanyahu have argued that he waged this recent assault on Iran—and, in turn, persuaded the US to join the war—in part to elicit popular domestic support and thereby pressure Herzog into granting him clemency. But Dokoupil did not ask Herzog about the pardon. He did not ask about the tens of thousands of civilians the Israeli military has killed during its war in Gaza, or about the hundreds more civilians who have been killed so far in the strikes against Iran, or about the million people it has displaced in Lebanon since the latest round of air strikes. At one point, Herzog said that Israel has been “protecting Europe, protecting the free world, for quite some time.” Dokoupil accepted the statement without comment. 

A majority of Americans, according to polls, disapprove of the United States’ involvement in the military strikes against Iran—some of them the same people who voted for Trump in part because he said he would stand against “endless wars.” Public approval for this conflict is lower than the support for other recent American military action at this stage. Yet those views were not foregrounded in the Evening News coverage produced in the Middle East, and in general, there’s been a feeling that a connection to the public interest is not being made: Weiss “just keeps saying ‘America’ and ‘people,’” one of the CBS staffers told me. “But what people in America?” 

During the Herzog interview, Dokoupil made his closest approximation to an acknowledgment of that dynamic just before wrapping up: “I just have one more question, because I’m cognizant of your time. What do you think this war does to the US-Israeli relationship going forward? And I ask because it’s not a popular war in America.” Herzog countered that Americans don’t understand the “intricacies” of the war and its potential to “bring real change in the Middle East for the future.” Dokoupil thanked him, and moved on.