Tony Dokoupil’s opening act as the anchor of “The CBS Evening News” has taken him on tour across America, hosting from a new city each night. The scenery has been lovely — the Golden Gate Bridge, Denver’s Union Station — and he has talked to notable people along the way. On Tuesday he interviewed President Trump at a Ford plant in Detroit. But the road has been rough.
A series of glitches and editorial choices have showed the weaknesses in Dokoupil’s readiness and his newscast’s philosophy. But he could perhaps take heart in one thing: At least people were paying attention.
After all, that anybody is scrutinizing a new nightly news anchor at all in the year 2026 is a minor miracle. (Yes, millions of people still watch evening newscasts, but how much chatter did you hear about Tom Llamas taking over at NBC?)
The rise of Dokoupil, a mildly affable presence with Clark Kent-ish looks, was notable less because of his star wattage than because of his bosses’ entanglements.
CBS last year became property of Skydance, whose leadership has close connections with President Trump. In December, The New York Times reported that the president said he had received assurances that the company would steer CBS News in a more conservative direction.
The new management hired as head of the news division Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist (whose past employers include The New York Times) and founder of the anti-“woke” bastion The Free Press. Her most visible steps have included pulling a “60 Minutes” segment on the Trump administration’s use of an El Salvador prison camp, as well as hosting a prime-time town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of the assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Weiss also hired Dokoupil, who as a co-host of “CBS Mornings” was rebuked by the previous management for falling short of editorial standards in a 2024 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about Coates’s new book. In that interview, he told Coates that a section critical of Israel “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” Under Weiss, this is evidently no liability.
Dokoupil and CBS promised big changes, releasing a five-point list of “values,” one of which sounded like something from a political convention platform: “We love America. And we make no apologies for saying so.”
“On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” Dokoupil told viewers in an introductory video. “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.” He mentioned no political side, but some of the language — “advocates,” “elites” — was an echo of conservative criticisms.
It was less mea culpa than they-a culpa, a green evening news anchor throwing the media, including his own employer, one of TV’s most storied news organizations, under the bus before his first day. (Did Norah O’Donnell not sufficiently love America or care about Americans? Did Walter Cronkite?)
And in the early episodes of Dokoupil’s feet-on-the-ground introductory stunt, the walk was less confident than the talk.
Dokoupil’s road trip was postponed a day by the military action against Venezuela. His unplanned weekend debut included a less-than-challenging interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In his first regularly scheduled newscast in studio, Dokoupil stumbled and shuffled papers as a photo of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona came up while he introduced a report on Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
“First day, big problems here,” he said. (The Times has reported that the fumble occurred in part because Weiss and her aides were rewriting the news script minutes before airtime.)
The first road show, in Miami, ended with a cringey segment on internet memes about Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Marco Rubio, we salute you! You’re the ultimate Florida Man,” Dokoupil said with a grin, over an A.I.-generated still of the administration’s point person on the seizure of a head of state cradling an alligator.
More troubling was the evidence of what CBS News’s professed new values look like in practice. Dokoupil’s brief coverage of the Jan. 6 Capitol assault anniversary simply noted, “President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of ‘whitewashing it.’”
History buffs might recall that President Trump had a somewhat larger role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s not that Dokoupil and Weiss have made “The CBS Evening News” into Fox News II. In broad strokes, it is still much like every network newscast. But it seems to be taking pains to show that it is willing to listen to conservatives and to challenge liberals. Its political interviews have tended toward Trump officials who defend administration policy and Democratic leaders who have criticized their own party for excesses to the left, like Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco and Governor Jared Polis of Colorado.
But Dokoupil’s debut has been dominated by the killing of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at a protest in Minneapolis. It was the kind of big, incendiary news story that tests a news outlet’s mettle and might specifically test the new CBS philosophy of bringing the facts to a polarized country.
At times, you could see how the “We’re listening to you” platitudes could be used in the service of reporting. In an interview with the border czar, Tom Homan, Dokoupil pressed him on whether ICE had ever used excessive force. When Homans denied it, Dokoupil said that viewers he had talked to “are going to be yelling at their television.” He added, “You’re calling them crazy.”
Essentially, he was using his viewers here as a framing device and a permission structure to push an administration official — hey, I’m not asking this, the people are! Tuesday night, as Dokoupil landed an interview with President Trump in Detroit, he used the approach repeatedly, as when asking whether the president was paying more attention to foreign affairs than the domestic economy: “When I talk to your own voters, they want your focus to be on them, and they feel like it may be drifting.”
But the Jan. 8 newscast, from Minneapolis, showed how the focus on viewers’ feelings can devolve into squishy pabulum, as Dokoupil closed with a little homily. Americans need “to find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us,” he said. “It’s not my job to tell you what to think about what happened here yesterday, but I can tell you we owe our children a nation that is better than the one we live in today.”
Yes, it’s not Dokoupil’s job to give viewers his opinion about the shooting video; he isn’t hosting “The Daily Show.” But suggesting that both sides should get along better is itself an opinion.
Viewers have turned to news anchors in troubled times for more than just the facts — for affirmation, comfort, insight. But those rare moments have power when the anchor has earned respect over years rather than days, tackling contentious stories with integrity.
The Minneapolis killing is one of those hard stories. Here, we had an argument over national principles that ended in a killing everyone could see yet still couldn’t agree on. You had the ongoing litigation of facts and intent, including high government officials saying that the dead woman had engaged in “domestic terrorism” and “was trying to ram” an officer with a vehicle she appeared to be turning away from him.
This is the sort of story newscasts cover best not with sermons or counseling but with reporting and visual analysis — like a detailed video breakdown, including the input of a former ICE officer, that CBS posted on the “Evening News” YouTube account. It did not air on the Thursday newscast from Minneapolis, but it spoke louder than Dokoupil’s words.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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