CBS News appointed Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” on Wednesday, charging him with taking on ABC’s dominant David Muir on one of the flagship shows for broadcast television.
Dokoupil, who has been part of the “CBS Mornings” team since 2019, will start his new job on Jan. 5. He replaces the anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who both announced they were leaving the network in recent months.
Dokoupil is the first major hire for Bari Weiss, the Free Press founder who was appointed CBS News editor-in-chief this fall after the network’s corporate takeover by Paramount.
“We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media,” Weiss said. “Tony Dokoupil is the person to win it back. That’s because he believes in old school journalistic values — asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account.”
He’s got a challenge. The “CBS Evening News” has long ranked third among the broadcast network evening news shows, and this year has just over half the audience of ABC’s “World News Tonight.”
Dokoupil, 44, who is married to MS NOW’s Katy Tur, has been with CBS News since 2016. He worked at MSNBC prior to that, and wrote for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He hosts a weekly streaming show, “The Uplift,” about positive news stories and wrote the memoir, “The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son and the Golden Age of Marijuana,” about his father’s life as a drug smuggler.
CBS News reprimanded Dokoupil following a contentious interview about Israel and the Palestinians with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on Sept. 30, 2024. Speaking to Coates about an essay he wrote, Dokoupil said it “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and asked Coates what offended him about the existence of a Jewish state.
Then-CBS News chief Wendy McMahon said at the time that “our job is to serve our audience without bias or perceived bias.” A phone call of McMahon discussing the issue with CBS staff members was leaked to the Free Press — edited by Weiss.
Promising viewers a commitment to “the plain truth”
In a statement, Dokoupil said Wednesday that “after 20 years of journalism, traveling through all 50 states and talking with people in hundreds of far-flung American places, I realize why a country this big needs a show this ambitious.” He promised viewers “a commitment to trust and the plain truth.”
During the search for a new “CBS Evening News” anchor, Weiss reached out to people outside of the network, including Bret Baier at Fox News Channel and Anderson Cooper, who reports for CBS’ “60 Minutes” along with his nightly anchor job at CNN.
Baier is a competitor, and an uncomfortably close one at that: his Fox evening newscast averages 3 million viewers a night, compared to the 4.04 million at the “CBS Evening News,” and has beaten CBS head to head 11 times this year, according to the Nielsen company.
Once king of the hill in Walter Cronkite’s era, the “CBS Evening News” fell to third place in nightly news viewership during Dan Rather’s long tenure. That status hasn’t changed through the lengthening list of his successors: Katie Couric, Jeff Glor, Scott Pelley, Norah O’Donnell and the team of Dickerson and DuBois.
This year, Muir’s ABC newscast has averaged 7.83 million viewers a night, with the “NBC Nightly News” anchored by Tom Llamas has 6.19 million, Nielsen said.
Worse for CBS, the gap has widened. The ABC newscast is down 2% in viewers over 2024 and NBC is down 3%, while the “CBS Evening News” is down 16 percent.