The Five Farcical Principles of the 'CBS Evening News'

[muriel_volestrangler]

This is great writing, as well as a marvellous takedown of Bari Weiss and Tony Dokoupil.

It’s going horrendously. I don’t mean there have been a few minor speed bumps; I mean the bus is pancaked, Wile E. Coyote–style, against the side of the mountain. Ratings have nosedived. The broadcasts have been beset by basic technical errors. Dokoupil has been pilloried on both the left and the right, to the point that he seems to have broken several of his critics’ brains in fascinating new ways: Megyn Kelly, whose brain wasn’t exactly running smoothly to begin with, blamed Weiss’s sexual orientation for convincing her to hire the “soft” Dokoupil. (“This is a lesbian’s idea,” she sneered, “of what women want.”) A new exposé about the chaos inside CBS News seems to drop every day, stuffed with juicy quotes from staffers furious about Weiss’s leadership. (They’re also stuffed with bizarre details: According to a scorched-earth New York Times piece last week, one of the lieutenants Weiss brought with her to CBS is Sascha Seinfeld, whose main qualification seems to be that she’s Jerry Seinfeld’s daughter.) At one point, Dokoupil cried on the air.
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Principle No. 1: “We Work for You.”
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To be plain, then: Dokoupil works for Weiss, Weiss works for Ellison, and Ellison works for his family’s business interests, which means seeking favor from the White House. To be plainer still: In the silent depths of interstellar space, there are clouds of ionized gas that are doing as much to “work for you” as any of these people.
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Principle No. 2: “We Report on the World as It Is.”
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How accurate is it? Not particularly! I don’t mean Dokoupil lies on camera, or even distorts narratives Fox News–style. It’s more that the tone of his reporting, which combines a professionally folksy everyman demeanor with low-calorie pseudo-gravitas, smooths away the sharp edges of events, favoring vibes of unity and healing over real understanding, particularly when the causes of a tragedy lie in right-wing ideology. Conservative media reacted to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by trying to convince you she had it coming; Dokoupil, by contrast, delivered a much-mocked soliloquy filled with high-toned rhetoric that, on close examination, didn’t seem to mean much at all. “There is so much to say about the last 24 hours,” he intoned, “but sometimes, what matters most is what is yet to be said at all, and what we all still need to hear.”
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The effect of this speech was to turn an event with very clear and specific political causes into a lukewarm bath of emotions. The real tragedy, Dokoupil seemed to say, isn’t that ICE shot Good; the real tragedy is our national mood, and our national mood can be rescued by Dokoupil looking into the camera and taking it very, very seriously. All the words, in this case, were weasel words. None of them honestly, directly depicted “the world as it is”; instead, they softened the world into a gentle, sorrowful, vaguely mysterious blur. In this way, CBS seemed to acknowledge our feelings while suggesting that no one, least of all the people whose decisions led to Good’s death, could possibly be held to account.

https://www.theringer.com/2026/01/21/media/tony-dokoupil-bari-weiss-cbs-evening-news-whiskey-fridays