More than 20 current and former CBS News staffers took shots at network chief Bari Weiss and CBS News’ star anchor Tony Dokoupil in a blistering Vanity Fair profile this week.
The piece, published Thursday, portrays Dokoupil’s first months anchoring CBS Evening News as a disaster — and blames much of it on Weiss, the former New York Times columnist and founder of The Free Press who was installed to overhaul the struggling network.
Vanity Fair claimed that Weiss pursued bigger names before landing on Dokoupil — including Fox News anchor Bret Baier and CNN’s Anderson Cooper — neither of whom took the job.
“He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the f—ing job,” one CBS correspondent said. “A useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”
A producer was equally brutal.
“Tony has the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with,” the producer said. “But Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”
The debut broadcast didn’t help. Weiss personally rewrote portions of Dokoupil’s teleprompter script at the last minute on President Donald Trump’s foreign policy — inserting the edits in the wrong place. The result was a stumbling, dead-air-filled first broadcast that Dokoupil acknowledged on-air: “First day, big problems here.”
“What a disaster,” one former CBS anchor told Vanity Fair. “Honestly, I would’ve f—ing killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”
The revolt goes deeper than a rocky launch. Staffers fumed over a segment in which Dokoupil wrapped a broadcast from Miami with what insiders called an unsolicited tribute to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“This is what happens when you get somebody who’s only ever worked on a morning show,” one CBS journalist told Vanity Fair. “He just thinks, ‘Oh yeah, why don’t we dedicate two minutes of this 19-minute broadcast to glazing Marco f—ing Rubio?'”
CBS News pushed back hard at the report they called full of “old and false rumors” peddled by unnamed sources.
“Tony Dokoupil is an exceptional talent and experienced journalist who continues to build a program designed to reach audiences wherever they consume the news,” the network said in a statement.
The revolt comes as Weiss continues reshaping CBS News away from the left-wing editorial legacy that drove the network’s ratings into the ground. C
BS Evening News drew just 3.8 million viewers in the week of April 14 — well behind both ABC and NBC — with only 482,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demographic.