Tony Dokoupil’s ‘CBS Evening News’ Debut Is an Inauspicious Sign of Where CBS News Is Headed

Tony Dokoupil’s debut as the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” came widely heralded — by Tony Dokoupil.

The broadcast journalist, who since 2019 had been CBS’ morning show co-anchor, came into the seat once held by Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Katie Couric with plenty of attitude, saying in a recent social-media comment that he would be “more accountable and more transparent” than had been legendary anchor Cronkite and, on New Year’s Day, sharing a video in which he declared his broadcast had often “missed the story” by privileging “the perspective of advocates and not the average American.” 

All of which conveniently mirrored the career-long attitude of Dokoupil’s new boss; Bari Weiss, the opinion journalist brought in last year as CBS News’ editor-in-chief by new Paramount leader David Ellison, has long evinced a relentless focus on presenting her perspective as that of the common man, no matter how many of her fellow Sun Valley attendees may coincidentally share it. 

Dokoupil carried out the brief. On his hurriedly moved-up debut Saturday night, before his official start date, the anchor covered the U.S. capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro almost exclusively through a lengthy but unchallenging interview of U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth, one in which the administration’s perspective was aired so thoroughly as to raise the question of when an interview becomes a press release. (In this aspect, Dokoupil’s work certainly suited the Weiss doctrine: The news chief’s first big scandal on the job arose right before Christmas when she held a “60 Minutes” segment over its not sufficiently representing the side of the administration, who had declined comment in the first place. For Weiss, it may not be news if the nation’s current leadership doesn’t get an unchallenged say.) 

And in his official first broadcast on Jan. 5, Dokoupil betrayed a Weissian willingness to bulldoze past that which might seem too untidy for whatever hypothetical viewer he and his editor have in mind. Dokoupil blandly stated to the camera that a Russian-Chinese-Iranian base of influence in Venezuela will be destabilized by the U.S. military action, without citing any source or consulting any guest; a brief interview with a financial expert about how the events in South America will affect the price of gasoline never broached the notion of whether the U.S. extracting Venezuelan petroleum is legal. Perhaps that might have constituted consulting advocates, and not the average American. But it would have been part of telling the whole story. 

Not that that seems to be Dokoupil’s strong suit, or his interest. Elsewhere, in a segment about health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly announced and seismic shifts to the recommended vaccine schedule for children, Dokoupil began an interview with a CBS News medical journalist by asking what this expert would say to “parents out there who are celebrating,” because they thought their kids were obliged to be injected with too many vaccines. He ended the segment by declaring “So, parents are going to have some options for themselves!” when, to a large portion of the audience, the precise opposite is true — they’ll now need a physician consult to obtain a vaccine for their child that was once more easily obtained. Dokoupil thanked his guest and announced, brashly, “You clarified it for us.” The guest could be said to have tried his best, despite Dokoupil. 

Weiss has been reported to have pursued Fox’s Bret Baier and CNN’s Anderson Cooper for this role, but after both stars wisely chose to keep their sinecures, she likely had to choose from among the army she had — but Dokoupil lacks the charisma and aptitude to turn the “Evening News” into whatever it is she may want. He babbled confusedly, then fell silent, when a segment about Sen. Mark Kelly jumped ahead of a segment about Gov. Tim Walz in the lineup — the kind of shift an anchor is supposed to be able to handle without painfully long seconds of dead air. “First day, big problems here,” Dokoupil said with evident frustration.

And an newscast-ending segment about a small town in Oregon raising funds by selling a nude calendar of senior citizens felt neither like the news (the movie “Calendar Girls,” about a similar real-life case in the U.K., is more than 20 years old) nor conveyed with wit, elan — or even access. Weiss’ journalism, through her career, has many things that distinguish it, but it fundamentally lacks sensibility. Why was just broadcasting a bunch of nude photos of senior citizens a story? So that Dokoupil could giggle through it. 

Thankfully, just like parents, viewers have some options for themselves — and few, it seems likely, will choose this reboot. The hypothetical viewer who wishes their news were pitched at a more conservative tenor is super-served by Fox News and Newsmax; evening newscast viewership has been dropping across the board, and, in terms of comfort in the chair and ability to convey thought, Dokoupil has a way to go and will likely move in the wrong direction. Say this much, though: Weiss’ management of “60 Minutes” has so far been a tragedy, in that it is shattering the credibility and prestige of what remains to this day one of the signature, and most popular, programs of any type in American television. The “Evening News” has been ebbing into irrelevance for years for reasons entirely beyond political slant. Perhaps sequestering Dokoupil there might contain the damage that might be done by an anchor whose ambitious ability to see which way the wind blows has so far outstripped his broadcasting talent.