CBS News on Wednesday named Tony Dokoupil, one of the hosts of its morning show, as the next anchor of the “CBS Evening News.”
His appointment is the first significant shake-up at the broadcast news division under its new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist who entered the job with little background in television news.
“CBS Evening News” is the network’s flagship nightly newscast, drawing several million viewers each night, although it lags its competitors at ABC and NBC. Mr. Dokoupil, 44, is set to replace the dual-anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, both of whom have said they are leaving the network.
“We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media; Tony Dokoupil is the person to win it back,” Ms. Weiss said in a statement on Wednesday. “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.”
Ms. Weiss, who founded the independent news and opinion site The Free Press shortly after she quit the Opinion section of The New York Times, began her job at CBS in October. She was hired by David Ellison, the billionaire who acquired CBS’s parent company, Paramount, this year. Paramount made a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN, on Monday.
Reshaping the “Evening News” has been on Ms. Weiss’s agenda, and she previously mused about the idea of hiring the Fox News anchor Bret Baier to take up the anchor chair. (Mr. Baier is on contract at Fox through the end of 2028.)
Mr. Dokoupil is a veteran TV journalist who joined CBS as a correspondent in 2016. (He is married to the MS NOW anchor Katy Tur.) He is also a keen student of television history, and on Wednesday he called “Evening News,” the former home of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, “the oldest, boldest, most storied, battle-scarred show in television news.”
“It’s a really important show at an important time,” he said as his “CBS Mornings” co-hosts, Gayle King and Nate Burleson, toasted his new job on Wednesday’s program.
Ms. Weiss is a skeptic of old-line news organizations, and an incident last year involving Mr. Dokoupil, before she joined the network, led to some of her loudest criticisms of CBS News.
During an interview in November 2024, Mr. Dokoupil challenged the author Ta-Nehisi Coates about a new book he had written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Dokoupil told Mr. Coates that some of the material in the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” adding, “what is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”
Mr. Coates replied: “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state; I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”
Some CBS journalists objected to how Mr. Dokoupil had handled the interview, and the news division’s leadership rebuked the anchor on a newsroom-wide conference call, saying the interview had fallen short of editorial standards. That prompted Shari Redstone, the owner of Paramount at the time, to defend Mr. Dokoupil and reprimand her own executives, saying “they made a mistake” in questioning the anchor.
Ms. Weiss’s Free Press was all over the story. The site published a leaked audio recording of the internal CBS editorial meeting about the subject and criticized the network for a perceived anti-Israel bias. “It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations,” the site wrote in an editorial.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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