“CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil stumbled through his first regular broadcast Monday night, tripping over a teleprompter pivot and leaving viewers with several seconds of dead air as he struggled to decide which segment to report.
Dokoupil, newly installed as anchor of “CBS Evening News,” had already been thrust into the spotlight over the weekend after hosting a special Saturday edition to cover the the American capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
Monday’s broadcast was his first scheduled turn in the chair following the appointment by Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief who tapped Dokoupil for the job last month.
The show opened with continued coverage of Venezuela, where Dokoupil closed a segment by framing the US operation as a strategic blow to rival powers operating in the region.
“What is it actually about?” he said.
“Well, if you zoom out a bit, you can maybe see the outlines of an answer. For decades, Russia, China, and Iran have been building a presence in Venezuela … With Maduro now out, that base of power and influence could be out too.”
Dokoupil, who had urged viewers to hold him accountable before taking over the anchor chair, then attempted to move the program along.
“All right, to other news,” he said.
“As you just heard from Jill, well, to other news now. Uh, to Governor Walz. No, we’re gonna do Mark Kelly. First day, first day, big problems here. Uh, are we going to Kelly here or are we gonna go to Jonah Kaplan?”
The confusion was followed by roughly four seconds of silence as the broadcast stalled on live television.
“We’re doing Mark Kelly,” Dokoupil continued after the pause.
CBS insiders who spoke to The Post lamented the errors on Dokoupil’s broadcast on Monday — with one saying “s—t happens.”
“It’s just unfortunate it was on the first night,” one network insider told The Post.
A second insider who spoke to The Post said Dokoupil should have anticipated mishaps, which is “anchoring 101.”
“Any seasoned anchor knows to always be looking ahead,” the insider said, adding: “When they messed up in the control room, he should have ad libbed and it would have been clean.”
“Every anchor has pages and the anchor’s job is to look at them and get ahead of the segment or take a pause for a moment and look at their papers,” the insider added.
The source said that Dokoupil’s error “shows inexperience.”
It’s “like he doesn’t have a sensitivity chip,” the insider said.
The on-air misfire capped a whirlwind start for Dokoupil, who was elevated to the evening anchor desk amid broader upheaval inside the network’s news division.
Weiss, who recently took over as CBS News editor-in-chief following Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount, is still early in her tenure and already facing internal resistance, according to reporting cited last week by The Independent.
Dokoupil, a co-host of CBS Mornings since 2019, was named anchor last month after Weiss failed to lure a marquee name from a rival network to rescue the perennially third-place broadcast.
His promotion followed the abrupt end of the short-lived co-anchor experiment featuring John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
In the weeks leading up to Monday’s debut, Weiss spearheaded a high-profile promotional push built around a 10-city “Live From America” tour, which was intended to send Dokoupil across the country during his first two weeks at the desk.
According to three sources cited by The Independent, Weiss planned to charter a private plane to ferry Dokoupil, CBS Evening News executive producer Kim Harvey and others between cities — an expensive move that rankled staffers as the network continues to lay off employees and brace for more cost cuts.
The tour was postponed after the Venezuela crisis, forcing Dokoupil to debut Saturday night from San Francisco instead.
Behind the scenes, Weiss’ hands-on involvement has prompted pushback, with staffers complaining about last-minute logistical changes, location demands and the addition of what sources described as a heavily armed security detail for Weiss.
One CBS News employee told The Independent that the optics clashed with Dokoupil’s stated mission to reconnect with “average Americans.”
“Nothing says ‘meeting Americans where they are’ by flying around the country on a private jet costing millions of dollars,” the staffer told The Independent.
Sources told the outlet that morale inside the “CBS Evening News” operation has cratered, with frustrations increasingly directed at Harvey for greenlighting Weiss’ demands.
Production teams were reportedly scrambling over the holidays to rebook locations after Weiss “blew it up” on Christmas Eve with new requirements, including filming at upscale restaurants and private schools that staffers said were disconnected from the communities being featured.
The Independent also reported that internal production sheets outlined a dizzying mix of planned segments — dubbed “Bari Pitches” — ranging from hard political interviews to lighter, social-media-friendly stunts such as Dokoupil jet skiing with DJ Khaled or partying at exclusive nightclubs.
The Post has sought comment from CBS News.
