All posts tagged: Dokoupils

Tony Dokoupil’s Tribute to Fired Scott Pelley on CBS Evening News

Tony Dokoupil’s Tribute to Fired Scott Pelley on CBS Evening News

Tony Dokoupil shared some heartfelt words on CBS Evening News about his former colleague Scott Pelley after the veteran journalist was fired on Tuesday. During Wednesday’s show, Dokoupil — who was appointed anchor of the evening newscast by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss at the start of her tenure last year — took a moment to praise Pelley’s career. “When I started at CBS, Scott Pelley was in this very chair, and still doing a dozen stories a year for 60 Minutes. And amid all of that, still meeting every new correspondent to share his view of the mission here,” he said. “He believed freedom of the press, to quote [James] Madison, was ‘the right that guaranteed all the others.’ And the stakes are always that high in that, if you’d made it to CBS News, you were among the best in the world. He worked every single day to live up to that standard.” A compilation of some of Pelley’s work at CBS over the years, after he joined the network in 1989, was then played. The video …

Tony Dokoupil’s viral first week should worry Bari Weiss

Tony Dokoupil’s viral first week should worry Bari Weiss

As Tony Dokoupil himself put it on his chaotic first official day anchoring the “CBS Evening News,” “First day, big problems here.” He was supposed to start his new gig as anchor on Monday, but his debut, in a kind of preview appearance, was moved forward to Saturday, Jan. 3 following the breaking news of Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. Hand-picked by CBS News editorial director Bari Weiss, herself plucked for the position by parent company SkyDance Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has ties to Trump, Dokoupil’s first week as anchor was hyped as a coronation of sorts. Instead, his carefully stage-managed rollout — a 10-day private jet tour to promote a new ideological era at CBS News — was derailed by reality in Trump’s America. When the U.S. government abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, suddenly Dokoupil’s “reinvention” of the evening news had to contend with actual breaking news. In his first week on the job, and in the bizarre publicity blitz that preceded it, Dokoupil has attempted to position …