This probably wasn’t the kickoff to a run on “CBS Evening News” that Tony Dokoupil — or his bosses — envisioned.
The anchor, a veteran of CBS News’ morning program, was to have launched his tenure Monday, but a stunning attack on Venezuela by U.S. forces followed by an extraction of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, made his appearance on the network’s evening news all the more necessary, particularly as top personnel at other networks, including Tom Llamas at NBC and Kaitlan Collins at CNN, unveiled their intention to show up for weekend duty on their networks’ evening schedules.
So here was Dokoupil, on Saturday evening, working to brief viewers on the latest developments, aided by correspondents like Charlie D’Agata and Scott MacFarlane — and a three-segment interview with U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Viewers may have expected to see Dokoupil out from behind the desk, taking the temperature of more average Americans. Earlier this week, after all, he appeared in a promo telling potential viewers that “on too many stories the press missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
Saturday’s “CBS Evening News” had no direct input from average Americans, and Hegseth, who enjoys a level of power most people in the U.S. do not, could certainly be viewed as “elite.”
Dokoupil has many challenges ahead. “CBS Evening News” has run in third place, well behind ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “NBC Nightly News,” for years, and its standing has been eroded more in recent months as CBS tested a two-anchor format with Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson that ended up shedding viewers. While NBC has relied on just four anchors for “Nightly News” in about 40 years, CBS keeps swapping them out, moving in Scott Pelley, then Jeff Glor and Norah O’Donnell in just the span of a few years. Such tinkering makes the task of connecting with loyal viewership a more difficult one.
He has been picked to try and foster new audience ties by Bari Weiss, the recently installed editor in chief of CBS News. She arrived at the Paramount Skydance-backed outlet after it spent a reported $150 million on her opinion site, The Free Press. Weiss has no experience running a mainstream TV-news organization, and in recent weeks, it has begun to show. There have been controversies over a fully-vetted “60 Minutes” report that she ordered held, and people familiar with the newsroom say staffers have grown frustrated that a continued focus on her managerial decisions has taken attention away from serious journalism produced by CBS News reporters. CBS News was early to break news of the Venezeula strikes in the week hours of Saturday morning, as well as key details about some of the planning for the operations.
Weiss hasn’t exactly smoothed the way for her anchor. Dokoupil’s early-January start was unveiled just three weeks ago, giving CBS little time to seed the ground for his arrival. TV network usually spend longer periods of time touting the looming arrival of a new evening anchor, and often send that journalist to meet with executives and staffers at affiliates around the nation, where local anchors are asked to push viewers to the national telecast that follows. Three weeks leaves little time to use outdoor advertising or other promotional tactics to spur interest, and a digital video distributed this week showing Dokoupil striving to get attention from passers-by in Grand Central Terminal did not suggest he was well known.
With the new anchor’s arrival, CBS has tweaked the look of the venerable program, which has ties to the revered Walter Cronkite. The screen is less cluttered by graphics, distracting the viewer less from what the anchor has to say. Whether Dokoupil would have more detail to offer after a whole day of cable news and broadcast networks’ special reports on the subject, remained to be seen. In the end, CBS News ceded most of its time to Hegseth.
Saturday’s broadcast shouldn’t be seen as “the way it is,” as Cronkite used to say. Dokoupil was supposed to start his run on the program by visiting various U.S. towns and cities. Indeed, he was holding forth at KPIX, CBS’ San Francisco station Saturday evening. He is slated to return to New York for his Monday broadcast, delaying plans that are slated to have him start traveling by the middle of next week.
Dokoupil signed off Saturday night with the phrase, “That’s another day in America and the world.” But it was probably not just another day for him, and definitely the start of a longer journey.
