When Tony Dokoupil published his glossy plea to viewers — “don’t just trust me, make me earn it” — he was trying to position himself as the populist antidote to a broken media machine, but the American people should be forgiven for being skeptical. Dokoupil’s piece was hardly a confession; it was a PR exercise from a man who has spent two decades inside the very institutions that lost the public’s trust.
Megyn Kelly didn’t buy the act, and she blasted CBS for trying to rebrand the same tired elite as something new and compassionate, declaring legacy media “dead” and warning viewers not to be fooled by canned promises. Her rebuke was sharp and public because too many in the newsroom think a humble-sounding sentence can erase a long record of partisan framing and sloppy edits.
Far from honest self-reflection, Megyn rightly accused the network of revisionist history — recasting past failures as mere misunderstandings while protecting insiders. She’s been cataloguing CBS’s edits, spin and hypocrisy for months, from sanitized interviews to friendly profiles, and conservatives are right to demand specifics, not sermonizing.
Let’s be blunt: Dokoupil isn’t an outsider who finally saw the light; he’s a CBS veteran stepping up from the morning show to take the Evening News chair, and his launch comes with all the institutional baggage that killed trust in the first place. Promises about “putting viewers first” ring hollow when stitched together by the same managers and agendas who long ago decided which stories to push and which to bury.
That’s why conservatives should not be swayed by a feel-good memo or a cross-country tour meant to humanize a corporate anchor; we should hold him to his words and keep the pressure on every night. Dokoupil’s invitation to “earn” trust is welcome only insofar as it’s followed by transparency, accountability, and a genuine willingness to challenge power — including the power inside his own building.
Patriotic Americans know that a free press must be fierce, not flattering, and it must answer to the public rather than to elites. If Dokoupil wants to prove Megyn and the rest of us wrong, let him start by reporting without favor, admitting mistakes when they happen, and refusing the revisionist spin that made the mainstream press a laughingstock — then we’ll listen.
