Tony Dokoupil wants to be a newsman for the average American.
In a New Year’s Day video manifesto, the new “CBS Evening News” anchor told viewers what they could expect from his version of the storied news program.
“People do not trust us like they used to,” he said. “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.”
Dokoupil’s vision for a more populist and personal version of the news broadcast started to come into focus during the first week as anchor. His debut has come under special scrutiny as the most visible personnel shift made by CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, the self-described “radical centrist” who took the helm in October after billionaire David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance bought her website, the Free Press, for $150 million.
Weiss’s tenure has been rocky, characterized by layoffs, leaks and newsroom culture clashes. Last month, her last-minute decision to yank a ready-to-air “60 Minutes” report about the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison because Trump administration officials had refused to comment drew outrage from some veteran journalists at the network.
Weiss chose Dokoupil to help reenvision CBS’s evening news broadcast, which has long trailed those of NBC and ABC in the ratings. The 45-year-old made headlines in 2024 as a co-anchor of “CBS Mornings” for challenging author Ta-Nehisi Coates on a section of his latest book that compared Israel to the Jim Crow era in the American South.
The network cast the debut of “CBS Evening News With Tony Dokoupil” as a ratings success, saying the broadcast drew 4.4 million viewers, up 9 percent from the average of the last three months of 2025, and 20 percent better among viewers between the ages of 25 and 54. An analysis of Nielsen ratings by the entertainment trade publication Deadline found that the redone newscast drew considerably fewer viewers than CBS did last January, when it introduced its previous anchor team, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
The political color of Dokoupil’s anchoring is likely to remain closely watched as CBS’s owner, Paramount Skydance, pursues its hostile bidfor CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery, which has expressed its preference for a negotiated deal with Netflix. The outcome of that merger fight will depend partly on regulatory approval from the federal government. One big backer of the Paramount bid is Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a friend and supporter of President Donald Trump; the president said last month that he would be “involved” in vetting any deal.
“Conceivably there’s a market niche for broadcast news for something slightly right of center, not MAGA TV all the time like Fox, but a little more open to the possibility that Trump is not always wrong,” said Rodney Benson, a professor of media and communication at New York University. “That’s dangerous if it normalizes some very bad stuff, but CBS News could also be a place — kind of like the Wall Street Journal — where if you report critically on this administration it will have more impact than if it comes from the usual suspects.”
“But that’s a big ‘if’ especially as long as there is uncertainty about the merger with Warner Brothers Discovery,” he added.
As a way of reintroducing himself to viewers, Dokoupil filmed a video in which he walked around Grand Central Terminal trying to get attention from passersby by asking them how they would pronounce his name.
The video was lighthearted, a tone the new “CBS Evening News” is also embracing in newscast sign-offs, which often feature more upbeat fare. In Tuesday’s broadcast from Dokoupil’s boyhood hometown, Miami, one stop on the news program’s inaugural “Live From America” tour, the anchor brought the same sensibility to a segment on a famous Floridian: Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After narrating a series of AI-generated memes that showed Rubio in a variety of roles including “the prime minister of Greenland” and “the new Michelin Man,” he ended the segment saying: “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida man.”
A CBS News staffer called the segment “embarrassing and unnecessary,” speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “There’s broad agreement that at the very least it was cringe and at most it was deeply inappropriate.”
A spokeswoman from CBS News declined to comment.
Dokoupil was scheduled to start in his new role Monday, but his debut was moved up to Saturday after the U.S. military operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The news program featured a lengthy interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who characterized the action as “the most sophisticated, most complicated and most successful joint Special Operations raid of all time.” Dokoupil said it had been greeted with “cheers … from Caracas to Miami” but did not address the debate over the legality of the operation, condemnation by the United Nations or the estimated death of around 75 people.
“The administration’s perspective was aired so thoroughly as to raise the question of when an interview becomes a press release,” wrote Daniel D’Addario, Variety’s chief correspondent and its former television critic. The interview was a notable get, however, given Hegseth’s rare appearances in the mainstream press. CBS said it was the defense secretary’s first broadcast interview.
On Wednesday’s broadcast, Dokoupil took a more critical approach with border czar Tom Homan. In an interview, he showed the Trump official a video from earlier that day of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shooting 37-year-old Minnesota resident Renee Good and asked him what he saw when he watched it. Homan said several times that he couldn’t prejudge the incident and that it would be “unprofessional” to comment before a full investigation was carried out.
“I think many members of the public are calling for the same thing,” Dokoupil responded, pointing to judgments made by other top Trump administration officials immediately after the incident. “Maybe you can help me understand how the Department of Homeland Security could conclude so swiftly that this is a, quote, act of domestic terrorism, that this woman, quote, weaponized her vehicle.”
The CBS staffer who criticized the Rubio segment said the Homan interview “assuaged some of my concerns.”
The post Tony Dokoupil sets new tone for ‘CBS Evening News’ in first week as anchor appeared first on Washington Post.
