Controversial conservative Megyn Kelly has delivered a new nearly 13-minute rant about CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, in which the former Fox News star relentlessly mocked the broadcaster for crying during a TV segment.
After Dokoupil, 45, made headlines earlier this week for tearing up and repeatedly wiping his eyes while speaking to CBS News Miami about his childhood in Florida, Kelly, 55, took to her self-titled digital talk show to slam her fellow journalist for failing to keep his emotions at bay in front of the camera.
“There’s no crying in evening news,” Kelly asserted at the beginning of the tirade (below), which also featured guest Mark Halperin. “There might be some crying when a president is shot and assassinated right before your very eyes, like we saw with Walter Cronkite” when he covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, she said.
Kelly suspected that “that’s as far as most news anchors would ever have gone, traditionally,” but that under Dokoupil’s heavily criticized appointment to CBS Evening News by divisive CBS News chief Bari Weiss, “it’s the dawn of a new day” she’s not quite pleased with.
The broadcaster said she “literally could not believe my eyes” when viewing the footage of Dokoupil crying, and went on to highlight some of his past interviews with the network as evidence of her disdain for him and his reporting style.
She then invoked the words of Adam Carolla, and lambasted Dokoupil for perpetuating the “feminization of the newsroom” across the country.
Kelly and Halperin then sat for a few moments of live reactions to the CBS News Miami clip, with Kelly’s commentary including various exclamations ranging from “he’s crying” and “still crying” to “wiping his eye” “and “now his other eye,” all while Dokoupil reflected on his uncomfortable childhood and admitted to the local reporter that he “didn’t get a lot of sleep” the night before.
“Oh my God. It’s a no,” Kelly said when the footage ended. “I thought for sure that story was going to end in, ‘And [my family in Florida] were all killed in a house fire and I was the sole survivor,’ in which case I would’ve excused the multiple tears that preceded it.”
She continued, “The sobbing? The repeated voice quivering? The inability to recover? What is that?”
Halperin jumped in to lightly defend Dokoupil, saying that he had some grace for the CBS Evening News star for getting emotional over the topic of family, as Halperin admitted to also losing control of his emotions when he reflects on his. Still, he criticized the fact that CBS put the footage out as a promotional tool.
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“Oh, please,” Kelly replied. “You would never cry like that on the air.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Dokoupil at CBS News for comment.
Kelly’s criticism for Dokoupil comes after she landed in hot water in November for saying convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was “not a pedophile” because “he liked 15-year-old girls.”
Dokoupil’s new tenure as CBS Evening News anchor has also been widely criticized, with viewers taking issue with his coverage of the deadly ICE shooting of a woman in Minnesota to an on-air flub that prompted Dokoupil to call out “big problems” during a live shot.
Watch Kelly discuss Dokoupil crying on the air in the video above.
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