It was early January 2016 and Tony Dokoupil was complaining to his then-girlfriend Katy Tur about his career over falafel in Brooklyn. He’d had his dream job as a reporter, writing cover stories for Newsweek. Then the magazine collapsed. He moved to the NBC enterprise unit and that shuttered. He was shuffled over to the NBC investigations team and that shrunk. He felt there were no safe jobs in writing.
On the broadcast side, however, Tur’s career was flourishing as MSNBC’s campaign reporter covering Donald Trump. So, when their conversation turned to a news story Dokoupil had been reading about armed occupiers who’d taken hold of federal land in Oregon, she had an idea.
"You know that story, you've covered stories like that,” she told him. “You need to pitch this person right now and tell them that you'll get on a plane tonight and you'll go out there and you'll do that story. You should do it."
A couple days later, Dokoupil was in the middle of frigid Oregon, face to face with armed ranchers standing guard outside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Around 10 p.m., after the rest of the reporters had gone home, one of the men dragged a rocking chair to the end of the driveway, slowly unzipped his rifle from its case, and declared: “Come and get me FBI. Come and get me, I'm going to die for this.”
Dokoupil called into Lawrence O’Donnell’s producer on MSNBC and said, “Take me now, please put me on.” During the prime evening time slot, Dokoupil interviewed LaVoy Finicum live on-air for 10 minutes. (Police would later shoot and kill Finicum.) The interview went viral, launching Dokoupil’s broadcast career.
The experience marked a sharp departure for Dokoupil, whose journalism career had mostly involved gathering information, digesting it, and shaping it into text. Live TV, on the other hand, was “a direct vein from the world as it is happening to the viewer on the other side of the camera,” according to Dokoupil.
“I felt utterly at ease sitting there with him live having a conversation. I look back at it today, and I still feel like it was a good interview,” he says.
That was just three years ago. Now, 38-year-old Dokoupil is preparing for his first day as one of the new hosts of CBS This Morning, one of the biggest jobs in broadcast. I met him at the CBS studios just a few days before his premiere as he rehearsed alongside co-hosts and broadcast veterans Gayle King and Anthony Mason. He looks completely at ease shifting from banter about the most popular regional accents to a serious segment about the California wildfires.
“Tony’s doing awesome,” King tells me as she leaves the rehearsal for an affiliate lunch. “I’ve known him for awhile, so he’s not a stranger to me. But before now, we’ve mostly seen his serious side on camera. Now you’ll see he’s super duper witty and funny and good with spontaneity. He likes to play, and I like that.”
King will be the one constant at the morning show’s glass table. Norah O’Donnell and John Dickerson will be replaced by Dokoupil and longtime CBS correspondent and CBS This Morning: Saturday co-host Anthony Mason. O’Donnell will anchor CBS Evening News while Dickerson heads to 60 Minutes.
Though CBS watchers will recognize Dokoupil—he’s appeared as a correspondent on CTM about 200 times, by his estimate—he’s still a new face in the high-stakes and sometimes high-drama morning TV landscape. And he’s taken a nontraditional path here.
Dokoupil was born in Connecticut in 1980 to Ann, a teacher, and Anthony, a prolific drug smuggler and dealer. To celebrate the birth of his first son, Anthony lit up a joint in Farmington Medical Center.
“If you smoked Colombian weed in the 1970s or 1980s, I owe you a thank you card,” Dokoupil writes in his 2014 memoir The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana. “You paid for my swim lessons, bought me my first baseball glove, and kept me in the best private school in south Florida, alongside George H. W. Bush’s grandsons, at least for a little while.”
Dokoupil’s parents used his dad’s earnings to get him into the tony Gulliver School in Miami. They paid in cash. Untrusting of banks, his father stashed piles of bills in Igloo coolers, and hundreds of thousands in his sister’s yard.
As a young child, Dokoupil idolized his father, even though he was a spotty presence in his life. Dokoupil writes in his book that for his fourth birthday, Anthony took Little Tony to Disney, but left him in the hotel room at night while he barhopped.
At age 10, Dokoupil’s mom got full custody and he didn’t see his dad for another decade. As a teenager, he was told his father sold real estate in Vermont and had an antique business, but there were murmurings his past involved drugs.
Determined to take a different path from his dad, Dokoupil studied business at George Washington University, where he graduated first in his class. After briefly working in public relations, he went to graduate school at Columbia, earning a fellowship to pursue a PhD in media studies with the goal of becoming a public intellectual.
“I thought what a great life! Drink coffee, read books, argue about things, write articles. I quickly realized you actually have to do a lot of research to be an academic,” Dokoupil says. “And I had a professor actually write on the top of one of my papers, ‘You have to decide if you want to be a writer or an academic.’ And I was like, ‘Huh, I guess I do.’ And I decided writer.”
Dokoupil got an unpaid internship at Newsweek and was eventually promoted to a full-time position. He wrote cover stories about the suicide epidemic and the crazy-making tendencies of the Internet.
“Newsweek was still like the Titanic; it had yet to sink,” he says. “It was a glittering operation. Giant tower, views of Central Park, oak paneling on the walls, white tablecloth dinners catered every Friday night, the black town car home was awesome. It was awesome. I wanted to do it the rest of my life.”
While working on a 2009 story about a Vietnam vet jailed in Burma who reminded him of his father, Dokoupil decided to learn more about his family history. He’d always heard his father had a checkered past, but he never knew the extent. Thanks to his access to court and police documents as a journalist, he ran a background check on Anthony and came across his 14-page indictment for importing 35,000 pounds of pot in 1986. He spent the next few years writing The Last Pirate, a memoir about his dad which was published by Random House in 2014.
In December 2012, Newsweek, which had combined with The Daily Beast, announced it was ending its print magazine to transition into a digital-only publication. The last issue hit newsstands on December 31, and in the weeks following, the newsroom saw massive layoffs. (A new owner has since taken over Newsweek and reintroduced the print product, but the magazine has continued to experience drama along the way.)
When Dokoupil began thinking about his next chapter, he realized many of his best print features were visual, narrative stories which would translate well to video—and, in fact, many of his Newsweek stories were picked up by the TV networks. So he set up meetings with 60 Minutes and NBC to pitch himself. In June of 2013, he left the world of print to become a senior writer at NBC News, where he reported, wrote, and produced videos and features for NBC News digital.
When NBC’s enterprise team shut down, Dokoupil was moved over to the investigations unit. When that team shrunk (NBC has since since beefed up its investigative unit), he landed at MSNBC as a national reporter, which included some on-air work.
During one of his segments on Al Sharpton’s afternoon show, Tur was sitting in the makeup chair with her hair half in curlers waiting to go on-air when she caught Dokoupil on the screen.
“I’m not very polite, so I said, ‘Who the fuck is that? Does he work here? How come I don’t know who he is?’” Tur tells me with a laugh over the phone. “The makeup artists all chimed in and said, ‘That’s Tony, we’ve all got a big crush on him.'”
Dokoupil says with an embarrassed smile: “It didn't occur to me until midnight that night in my crappy apartment drinking a whiskey, where I was like, that was weird that they introduced me to her because that never happens. Maybe I have a shot here.”
Shortly after they met, Tur’s work on the Trump campaign picked up and Dokoupil left MSNBC for CBS News. The couple decided to try long distance, with Dokoupil sometimes driving through the night to meet Tur at a campaign stop for a few hours. As Trump increasingly treated the media as his adversary on the campaign trail, he’d single out Tur by name at rallies with taunts like: "She's back there. Little Katy. She's back there."
Of course Trump won the election, but Tur didn’t follow him to the White House. After the campaign, Dokoupil and Tur got engaged and Tur stayed in New York, landing an afternoon anchor position on MSNBC.
In October 2017, the couple eloped in the Utah desert—the plan was to pick a place with no cell reception, so they could escape the news and politics. But their cover was blown. After Page Six reported on the elopement, they heard another couple in the lobby of the hotel say, “I heard Katy Tur is here.”
In April 2019, Susan Zirinsky, the brand-new president of CBS News, called Dokoupil into her office to say she was revamping CBS This Morning—and wanted him to take on a bigger role.
“She was doing all this buildup with the show and with the vision and everything and then she was like, ‘I don't think you're understanding me. I want you to be the third anchor,’” he says. “I'm not given to touchdown dances here. I'm sort of like, huh, OK, let's see. Yeah, I think I can do that.”
The offer collided with a personal milestone. On April 13, Dokoupil and Tur welcomed Theodore, their first child together. (Dokoupil has a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old from his previous marriage.)
“Having done the baby thing before, it's great because everything comes back to you. Like changing diapers, bottle feeding, shushing, how to work the car seat, how to work the stroller, the baby Bjorn,” he says. “So coming at it again is an absolute pleasure because I'm not rummaging through parenting books every two seconds. I kind of have a basic knowledge, and I can just enjoy it.”
The day we meet, Dokoupil is recovering from an all-nighter after Teddy experienced a projectile vomit incident. His first coffee of the day was at 5 a.m., when he polished off a canned latte he’d bought for Tur. Next weekend, after his inaugural week on the new job, his father is coming to visit and meet the baby. Anthony, who lives in federal housing in Massachusetts, has never seen his son on television, because the segments air too early in the morning, before he wakes up. But Dokoupil thinks his father is proud, and, for his part, he says he’s not as angry at his dad as he was when he wrote his memoir. And, in fact, he can now reflect on how his career was inspired by his father.
“My father was a guy who did his best storytelling in the creation of his own life, which was a mega story. He built himself into this romantic story: he self-consciously became the outlaw, the swashbuckling pirate of the ’80s. That was a figure in popular culture then, and he wanted to be it, and he made himself that. He could've walked away scot-free with millions in the bank and been a successful drug dealer, but he wanted the whole story. He wanted the highs and he wanted the lows, and he completed it,” Dokoupil says. “He loved a story and I got that from him. I think the journalism came directly out of the love of story.”
To prepare for his debut on Monday, Dokoupil plans to go to a final rehearsal on Sunday then go home to Tur and Teddy to watch the final episode of Game of Thrones. Teddy will be decked out in his “House of Dokoupil” onesie.
“You know, it's funny, I don't get nervous for this kind of thing. I just don't,” he says, leaning back in his office chair. “What's the worst thing that could happen? I become a writer?”
