How Tony Dokoupil Became the Face of ‘Zionist Fanatic’ Bari Weiss’s CBS
Based on interviews with nearly a dozen sources, Justin Baragona dives deep into the controversial and high-profile anchor’s approach to journalism, Trump, Israel, and the fallout in the CBS newsroom.
For years, Tony Dokoupil was a run-of-the-mill morning talk show host who had yet to make an indelible impression on television audiences.
And then came his explosive and combative September 2024 interview with celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which paved the way for Dokoupil to become the face of CBS News’s flagship nightly news program and the spiritual successor to Walter Cronkite just a year later.
“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil accusingly declared during the ‘CBS Mornings’ conversation.
It was that moment that everything appeared to change for Dokoupil.
Prior to that seven-minute segment in the fall of 2024, Dokoupil had been almost a non-entity, despite having spent five years as a co-anchor of a broadcast morning talk show. Suggesting that one of America’s preeminent thought leaders is an antisemitic terrorist, however, seemed to set off a series of events that possibly led to self-avowed “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss running the network and Dokoupil leading ‘CBS Evening News.’
Still, while the Coates interview proved to be a seismic shift, Dokoupil’s current and former colleagues tell me they were caught off guard at the time by the level of vitriol he showed in that moment.
“I was absolutely gobsmacked, and it did not comport with anything I recall about Tony being ideological. I never saw him being ideological in any way. That interview came straight out of the blue,” Joy Reid, who worked with Dokoupil at MSNBC, told me.
The intense and pointed nature of the questions to Coates, which saw Dokoupil ask the author what “so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state” and if he just didn’t believe Israel “has a right to exist,” apparently sparked murmurs within CBS News about Dokoupil’s possible connections to conservative pro-Israel groups and activists.
Three well-placed CBS News sources said there was internal speculation in the newsroom about whether pro-Israel advocacy groups such as the ADL had begun communicating with Dokoupil to build a relationship with the anchor following the October 7 attacks, though no evidence of editorial coordination has been established.
Two sources familiar with the matter told me that Noa Tishby, an Israeli actress and outspoken activist who once served as the Israeli government’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, met with Dokoupil.
The ADL denied that the organization had privately met with Dokoupil in recent years. Representatives for Tishby did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
CBS News did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether Dokoupil met with Tishby. A CBS News spokesperson had previously told Zeteo when reached for comment on this story that, “This whole screed reads like it was written in crayon on the back of a paper placemat. It’s entirely fabricated lies. Just like all of Zeteo’s ‘coverage’ of CBS News.”
That Dokoupil went from the controversy-sparking Coates interview to CBS News’s top anchor chair in little more than a year is not so much about the standard machinations of network newsrooms. Instead, this is a story, based on conversations with 11 people who have known him through the years, about what they say is a “mediocre” but “good-looking white guy” who has continually “failed upwards,” only to eventually hit pay dirt by defending Israel, saluting Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, and finding the one benefactor who would take him to the top – Bari Weiss. It’s also a behind-the-scenes account, based on multiple well-placed sources, of a newsroom divided over Dokoupil’s new status and journalistic approach.