For the past year, in the midst of the pandemic, the basement of Tony Dokoupil’s Brooklyn home has doubled as a makeshift television studio.
Dokoupil, who co-hosts “CBS This Morning,” and his wife, “MSNBC Live” anchor Katy Tur, have filmed their respective shows while sheltering in place. Despite working from home for much of the past year, Dokoupil, 40, says the pandemic has given both he and Tur a renewed appreciation for each other and their jobs.
“We talk a lot about the day’s news a lot and often debate issues,” Dokoupil says. “If I’m doing a political interview, I’ll often ask Katy for her input, since she anchors a political show, or if I’m working on a breaking story in the morning, I’ll tell Katy so that she can keep an eye on how the story develops.”
Photo by John P. Filo/CBS News
He admits that working in what he and Tur dub “The Basement Broadcast Center” with their 2-year-old son Teddy often playing upstairs with a nanny, was a significant change from reporting at the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan alongside his co-hosts Gayle King and Anthony Mason. “We have a great dynamic between the three of us,” Dokoupil says of his colleagues, with whom he works weekdays reporting on developing stories and conducting interviews with top newsmakers.
The feeling is mutual. King told USA Today in an interview last year that the “CBS This Morning” team “is a really good mix. You’ve got three different personalities that each bring something different to the table. We all really like each other and are having a good time.”
Dokoupil, who joined “CBS This Morning” in 2019 after serving as a New York-based network correspondent for three years, clearly relishes the daily challenge of being part of a morning television show and getting to know the people behind the stories.
“We have a very unique and inviting green room where viewers can see the guests as they wait to be interviewed,” Dokoupil says. “It’s amazing to see the conversations between guests who have never met before, such as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, and singer, Lizzo, who really hit it off while waiting to appear on camera.”
He recalls a memorable interview with iconic singer Dolly Parton. “Dolly is one of the most interviewed [people] in entertainment,” Dokoupil says. “She’s done over 40 years of sit-down interviews and I wanted to make my time with her different.” His interview began with Parton inviting him to sing along with her to her 1980 hit song “9 to 5.” “I’m a terrible singer,” admits Dokoupil, who accepted Parton’s invitation before asking how she wants people to remember her 100 years from now.
Photo by Michele Crowe/CBS News
From Print to Television
A former writer who started his career at Newsweek, Dokoupil began working at “NBC News” as a senior writer in 2013 before becoming a correspondent for MSNBC in 2015. It was there that Dokoupil met Tur when they were both in the network’s makeup room. After dating for two years, the couple married in October 2017.
Although Dokoupil’s transition to television seems seamless, he admits there was something of a learning curve. “I remember reporting live for CBS in 2016 on the man who was using suction cups to climb Trump Tower,” Dokoupil says. “It was kind of a scary story and the police were trying to talk the man down from the building. I thought I heard the studio say, ‘no’ in my earpiece and believed they were cutting away to something else, so I went silent, standing there looking confused and not realizing we were still on the air. I found out they were actually saying ‘go,’ which was an embarrassing mistake on my part, because you never want silence on live TV,” he says.
Yet Dokoupil also had many triumphs early on, solidifying his ability as a natural storyteller. In 2016, he traveled on his own accord to Oregon to report on armed occupiers who had taken hold of federal land. Dokoupil called the story in to MSNBC and they put him live on the prime evening show as he conducted an interview with one of the lead protestors.
With social media, a 24-hour news cycle and the rapidly changing news landscape, Dokoupil acknowledges it’s a fascinating time to be working in news media. “Gallup polls showed that trust in the media hit an all-time low in 2016,” he says. “Although trust in the media has improved since then, I think it makes you very aware of what you say and the facts you’re reporting.”
Dokoupil also makes it a priority to get viewers engaged and encourages them to be part of the conversation. “I always respond to viewer questions and my direct messages are open on Twitter,” he says.
“I think even though some people may mistrust the media, they trust their own preferred news source.”
Photos by Michele Crowe/CBS News
Roots in South Florida
Two years ago, Dokoupil was driving to an interview with singer-actress Jennifer Lopez when he found himself reminiscing about growing up in Miami in the 1980s. “South Florida is just a beautiful area, I still have cousins who live here,” says Dokoupil, who has returned to Florida for several assignments, including the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission at the Kennedy Space Center in 2019.
Photo by Michele Crowe/CBS News
Despite living in New York for many years, Dokoupil still has a soft spot for the Sunshine State. He attended Gulliver Prep in Miami and spent summers playing baseball and vacationing in the Caribbean with his family. His memories of the area also play a prominent role in his 2014 memoir, “The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son and the Golden Age of Marijuana.”
In the book, Dokoupil reveals how when he was 30, he learned his father, who left the family when Dokoupil was 10, had been a partner in an East Coast drug ring that smuggled marijuana into the U.S. “If you smoked Colombian weed in the 1970s and 1980s, I owe you a thank you card,” Dokoupil writes in his book. “You paid for my swim lessons, bought my first baseball glove and kept me in the best private school in South Florida, at least for a little while. But the truth is, I never really knew my father, not as a person distinct from the figure I idolized in the abstract.”
In order to get to know his father, Dokoupil tracked him down to interview him and to ask him to serve “as a tour guide to his past.” The two returned to Miami for a bit, as Dokoupil sought to gain a better understanding of his father.
He remembers his father saying to him during one of their conversations in Miami, “I loved you, I would die for you. But I was what I was. I was a scammer and a smuggler, and I was a good one. That’s it. That consumed me. I never thought about doing anything else.”
As the father of three children, a son and daughter from a previous marriage, and his son with Tur, Dokoupil says the book helped him to make peace with his dad. “When I look at my own children, as my father must have looked at me, I think my father is heartless for leaving. When I look at the man who left, I think he is human for doing so,” he says.
This month, Dokoupil and Tur are expecting a baby girl. They anticipate the summer to be a busy and exciting time, as Dokoupil’s two older children, ages 9 and 12, will be traveling from their home in Tel Aviv to spend the summer with him and to meet their baby sister for the first time. “My two older children typically spend every summer and holidays here, but due to the pandemic, we haven’t all been together for 18 months,” says Dokoupil.
By summer, Dokoupil hopes the family can possibly begin to enjoy some post-pandemic activities, noting that, during the past year, he and Tur have often looked wistfully at photos of Italy, Florida and California. “We’ll talk about what life might be like if we had completely different lives and lived somewhere else,” Dokoupil says. “And that’s usually followed by one or both of us saying, ‘Gosh, I’m tired,’ and calling it a night.”