Renowned for her candid advice, Abby Lee Miller once said, “Save your tears for the pillow.” Echoing a similar sentiment in the world of journalism, Megyn Kelly declared, “There is no crying in evening news.”

During a recent episode of her Sirius XM show, the Megyn Kelly Show, she and her guest, Mark Halperin, critiqued Tony Dokoupil, the newly appointed anchor of CBS Evening News. The critique came after a social media clip showed Dokoupil becoming emotional while reporting from Miami, his hometown.

Kelly was firm in her stance, stating, “There is no crying in evening news.”

She did acknowledge some exceptions, noting that tears might be appropriate “when a president is shot and assassinated right before your very eyes,” referencing Walter Cronkite’s emotional moment during the 1963 broadcast of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

“There was a subtle wiping of the eyes when he removed his glasses to announce that JFK had been shot and killed,” she remarked.

Halperin chimed in, “Little catch of the throat.”

Kelly continued, “That’s as far as [Cronkite] went. That’s as far as most evening news anchors would ever have gone traditionally. It’s the dawn of a new day.”

Dokoupil, who was tapped for the new role in December under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss , helmed his first broadcast on Monday (Jan. 5). A clip that did not actually air on CBS Evening News, but was shared on the evening news show’s social media, shows Dokoupil tearing up as he recalls his childhood while speaking with CBS News Miami reporter Lauren Pastrana.

Kelly pulled up a clip of Adam Carolla on The Adam Carolla Show, agreeing with his sentiments surrounding the alleged feminization of journalism. However, Kelly insisted that “it’s not just women who have feminized newsrooms,” proceeding to show the clip of Dokoupil, which she said CBS put out “to promote his new role as the CBS Evening News anchor.”

“Cause you only have one childhood, right?” Dokoupil replies in the clip after being asked why Miami is his “favorite place” in the world.

After taking a moment to try and compose himself, Dokoupil explains that “Florida is where [he] grew up.”

“My grandmother’s here, my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, cousins, and it’s where I would have spent all of my childhood, but we left because my father got in some trouble with business,” he shares. “We laugh about it now, but he was a drug dealer.”

In the segment, Dokoupil says his returns to Miami are “so emotional” because he feels like he was “robbed of the full Miami experience.”

Though Kelly inserted her own commentary as the CBS Evening News clip played out, she deemed the moment “a no” once it concluded.

“I thought for sure that story was going to end in, ‘And they were all killed in a house fire. I was the sole survivor,’ in which case I would’ve excused the multiple tears that preceded it,” she argued. “But it turns out the dad had some problems. I’m sorry to hear it. The sobbing? The repeated—the voice quivering? The inability to recover? What is that?”

Halperin, after praising Dokoupil’s”hella good hair,” let up on Dokoupil a bit, telling Kelly that he “do[es]n’t begrudge anybody crying over their family,” as he admitted he sometimes does. Nonetheless, he did question why the network chose to release the segment, as it “wasn’t live.”

DECIDER reached out to CBS News for comment.