Tony Dokoupil is called anchor of ‘CBS Night Information’
Media
He replaces John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois in some of the high-profile selections of Bari Weiss’s early tenure because the community’s editor in chief.
CBS Information on Wednesday named Tony Dokoupil, one of many hosts of its morning present, as the subsequent anchor of the “CBS Night Information.”
His appointment is the primary important shake-up on the broadcast information division underneath its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist who entered the job with little background in tv information.
“CBS Night Information” is the community’s flagship nightly newscast, drawing a number of million viewers every evening, though it lags its rivals at ABC and NBC. Dokoupil, 44, is about to switch the dual-anchor staff of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, each of whom have mentioned they’re leaving the community.
“We reside in a time by which many individuals have misplaced belief within the media; Tony Dokoupil is the particular person to win it again,” Weiss mentioned in a press release Wednesday. “That’s as a result of he believes in old-school journalistic values: asking the exhausting questions, following the details wherever they lead and holding energy to account.”
Weiss, who based the unbiased information and opinion web site The Free Press shortly after she give up the opinion part of The New York Instances, started her job at CBS in October. She was employed by David Ellison, the billionaire who acquired CBS’s dad or mum firm, Paramount, this 12 months. Paramount made a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the dad or mum of CNN, on Monday.
Reshaping the “Night Information” has been on Weiss’ agenda, and she or he beforehand mused concerning the concept of hiring Fox Information anchor Bret Baier to take up the anchor chair. (Baier is on contract at Fox by the tip of 2028.)
Dokoupil is a veteran TV journalist who joined CBS as a correspondent in 2016. (He’s married to MS NOW anchor Katy Tur.) He’s additionally a eager scholar of tv historical past, and on Wednesday he referred to as “Night Information,” the previous dwelling of Walter Cronkite and Dan Moderately, “the oldest, boldest, most storied, battle-scarred present in tv information.”
“It’s a very essential present at an essential time,” he mentioned as his “CBS Mornings” co-hosts, Gayle King and Nate Burleson, toasted his new job on Wednesday’s program.
Weiss is a skeptic of old-line information organizations, and an incident final 12 months involving Dokoupil, earlier than she joined the community, led to a few of her loudest criticisms of CBS Information.
Throughout an interview in November 2024, Dokoupil challenged writer Ta-Nehisi Coates a couple of new e-book he had written on the Israeli-Palestinian battle. Dokoupil informed Coates that a few of the materials within the e-book “wouldn’t be misplaced within the backpack of an extremist,” including, “what’s it that so notably offends you concerning the existence of a Jewish state that may be a Jewish protected place?”
Coates replied: “There’s nothing that offends me a couple of Jewish state; I’m offended by the concept of states constructed on ethnocracy, irrespective of the place they’re.”
Some CBS journalists objected to how Dokoupil had dealt with the interview, and the information division’s management rebuked the anchor on a newsroom-wide convention name, saying the interview had fallen in need of editorial requirements. That prompted Shari Redstone, the proprietor of Paramount on the time, to defend Dokoupil and reprimand her personal executives, saying “they made a mistake” in questioning the anchor.
Weiss’ Free Press was all around the story. The location printed a leaked audio recording of the interior CBS editorial assembly concerning the topic and criticized the community for a perceived anti-Israel bias. “It’s journalists like Tony Dokoupil who’re an endangered species in legacy information organizations,” the positioning wrote in an editorial.
This text initially appeared in The New York Instances.
