Editor’s note: Welcome to another segment of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” which takes a deep dive into the not-ready-for-primetime relaunch of “CBS Evening News” with anchor Tony Dokoupil. Since we taped the segment, things have gone from bad to worse for the perennial third-place evening news show. On Saturday, The New York Times and other media outlets reported that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt approached Dokoupil after he had interviewed Trump to relay a threat from the president. Leavitt warned the anchor, “We’ll sue your ass off” if CBS failed to post the tape of the entire interview, with no cuts.
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Edited transcript of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney.”
Hi, I’m Emily Rooney, and welcome to Beat the Press on Contrarian Boston. I’m here today, joined by Contrarian Boston Editor Scott Van Voorhis and Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy.
Today, we’re going to be taking a look at what’s left of CBS News, and we’ll start with the new launch of the “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil.”
Some technical glitches aside, it was cringeworthy all on its own.
I’ll start on this one as someone who was an executive editor of an evening broadcast myself with Peter Jennings, and whose dad worked at “60 Minutes” for 30 years, so I know a little bit about what he would think about this.
First, you know, Tony’s debut was a little ragged.
That’s fine.
You know, these things always get off to a shaky start.
Technical stuff didn’t bother me at all.
But I mean, he has this whole thing about how, you know, we don’t speak to regular people and elites and academics.
But then he spent half the broadcast talking to people on the street.
The problem with people on the street is they’re not as informed as elites and academics.
Let’s just be honest.
There were some good things about the broadcast.
He had some long-form interviews.
But the problem with the long-form interviews was that he wasn’t challenging.
He didn’t challenge Pete Hegseth on the legality of the takeover of an arrest of the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
He did this embarrassing long-form tribute to Marco Rubio from Florida, because he grew up in Florida - Tony grew up in Florida.
He did better with an interview with administration border czar Tom Homan and did challenge him a little bit.
But there were also some weird producing choices.
One night, they went from a story about Venezuela to an obituary on Michael Reagan, back to a story about the Somali ICE stuff going on in Minnesota.
It was like, you don’t just drop an obituary in the middle of a broadcast.
That doesn’t work. You’ve got to say who it was, what years they lived, why they were significant, and then you go to black and go to a commercial.
It’s producing one-on-one.
And finally, I’m going to say, you know, this whole reason why Tony has the job, which has been spoken about a little bit, but we said that Bari Weiss’s Achilles heel was going to be Israel.
She has proven that to be true.
Tony took on Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote the book “The Message” about Israel, likening Israel to apartheid and saying it was like the Jim Crow South.
I thought his challenge to Ta-Nehisi last year was valid.
It was good.
CBS standards took him to task at the time, which I didn’t think was right. But obviously, this caught the attention of Bari Weiss.
I don’t think Tony Dukupo would have been on her radar screen, but because of that, because he was defending Israel.
And by the way, Tony converted to Judaism.
His first wife lives in Israel with his two kids from his first marriage.
So he, he, clearly became on her radar screen because of that.
(00:03:19):
Dan, Scott, I wish them all the well. I don’t want to see CBS News fail. As I said, my dad was there for 30 years. It’s the home of Walter Cronkite, Henry Reasoner.
Dan Kennedy:
I didn’t necessarily think that Tony Dokoupil was the worst possible choice for this job.
I was willing to give him a shot.
And like you, Emily, I was untroubled by his exchange with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I thought Coates gave as good as he got, and it made for some good TV.
But this whole thing has been just completely embarrassing, telling us he’s going to be more trusted than Walter Cronkite.
Bothsidesism in the completely unjustified shooting of Rene Good in Minneapolis, his tribute to Marco Rubio.
And even though he’s getting some praise for his interview with Tom Homan, he never mentioned the $50,000 in the brown paper bag, which Kristen Welker asked him about repeatedly on “Meet the Press.”
Scott Van Voorhis: Yeah, there are definitely some issues there.
And the Holman interview clearly was a highlight of his work so far.
And he left obvious follow-up questions on that, including...
And Holman kept on saying, well, we’re going to withhold judgment.
But of course, Trump has already come out and made a judgment.
And of course, you know him.
And how can you then, how can anybody have any reasonable faith that there’s actually going to be an investigation of the shooting?
The interview kind of tiptoed around that - it could have been a little more probing on that,
it’s definitely, he, Tony, is definitely an interesting choice.
The whole ‘I’m going to talk to regular folks’ seems kind of hokey
He’s wearing this casual shirt.
You want to broaden your sources and try to talk to different people, but just relying on people in the street is probably not a good idea.
