Tony Dokoupil has been named anchor of “CBS Evening News,” one of the most prominent jobs in television journalism, CBS News announced Wednesday.
The promotion of the veteran journalist, who has co-anchored “CBS Mornings” since 2019, is the highest-profile personnel decision CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss has made since she was named to that position in early October.
“We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media,” Weiss wrote in a statement. “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. Americans hungry for fairness will see that on display night after night.”
Dokoupil’s move to prime time also marks a return to a single-anchor format for the evening news broadcast that in recent years had two co-hosts, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. In October, Dickerson announced he will step away at the end of the year from the show, which has suffered from lagging ratings; DuBois followed suit with his own announcement last week. Dokoupil’s first show will air on Jan 5.
Paramount Skydance, CBS’s parent company, bought The Free Press, Weiss’s conservative opinion outlet, for $150 million and tapped her for the newly conceived post of editor in chief. The newsletter Status first reported Dokoupil’s hiring Monday.
Within CBS News, Dokoupil’s mid-October interview with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu was considered an “audition” for the job in light of Weiss’s staunch support for Israel, one CBS staffer said on the condition of anonymity to speak about internal discussions.
Dokoupil came under unusual scrutiny when a September 2024 interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates turned contentious after Dokoupil said Coates’ book “The Message,” about Israel and the Palestinian territories, read like the work of “an extremist.”
“If I took your name out of it, took away the awards, and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away — the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil told Coates.
Afterward, CBS News executive Adrienne Roark told staff that the interview did not meet the network’s editorial standards and said the matter had been “addressed” with Dokoupil.
“CBS’s bigwigs hung Dokoupil out to dry,” Weiss and a co-author wrote two days later in a Free Press article, adding that it was at that point “not clear what Dokoupil did wrong, other than ask tough but substantive questions.”
Dokoupil joined CBS News in 2016 after a three-year stint at NBC News and MSNBC. Before that he was a writer at Newsweek and the Daily Beast.
Weiss’s first month in her position was rocky, with staffers describing an ongoing culture clash at the storied news network. CBS News laid off 100 people in October as part of broader cuts at Paramount Skydance. The division closed its South Africa bureau and ended “CBS Mornings Plus” (co-hosted by Dokoupil) and “CBS Evening News Plus,” streaming-only extensions of the morning and nighttime broadcasts.
The post Tony Dokoupil named anchor of ‘CBS Evening News’ appeared first on Washington Post.
