CBS News’ new MAGA-coded anchor Tony Dokoupil is receiving words of encouragement from a rival-network colleague as ratings for his evening news show tumble.
“Hang in there, you have many fans,” CNBC’s Squawk Box co-anchor Joe Kernen wrote to Dokoupil on X on Tuesday.
Kernen was responding to a post from the CBS Evening News anchor, in which Dokoupil defended his show, writing, “You may not agree with everything you hear on our broadcast, but we trust you to hear it, and we trust you to decide for yourselves.”
Overall ratings are down 23 percent for the first five days of Dokoupil’s time as anchor, as compared to this time last year, when Norah O’Donnell anchored the show, Variety reported.
When a random X user pointed out the dismal ratings to Kernen, Kernen pushed back, saying, “Well, let’s see, who was still watching CBS. people like you Jean.”
“unhinged hysterical TDS’ers. of course you’re not going to watch news presented objectively, right down the middle. Not to worry, plenty of places for you still out there. Unfortunately,” continued Kernen, who was once accused by his co-host of “being in the tank” for President Donald Trump.
Kernen’s support for Dokoupil came as CBS Evening News saw dismal ratings in its first week since Dokoupil took over as anchor. While more than 4.4 million people tuned into Dokoupil’s first night on air, ratings from the program declined by 11.4 percent as the week progressed.
And in the key 25-54 age demographic, which TV advertisers closely monitor, ratings went down 19.4 percent from Monday to Thursday.
The other two main broadcast primetime news shows—ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News—drew in hundreds of thousands more viewers than CBS last week.
CBS Evening News has been embroiled in controversy ever since MAGA-curious CBS boss Bari Weiss installed Dokoupil to take over the anchor chair as she continues to make the network more Trump-friendly.
Dokoupil, a former co-anchor on CBS Mornings and husband to MS Now’s Katy Tur, promised to be “more accountable and more transparent” than even Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS anchor often referred to as “the most trusted man in America.”
Before anchoring the show for the first time, Dukoupil accused the “legacy media,” which he and his wife have been a part of for over a decade, of having “missed the story.”
Dukoupil, who lives in a tony Brooklyn neighborhood and attended $53,000-per-year Gulliver Preparatory as a child, said CBS Evening News under his watch would no longer place “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
Dokoupil’s first week on the job was already off to a bumpy start, even before the poor ratings were revealed.
While he anchored from Miami and Denver last week, his show was derailed several times, as he stumbled over the teleprompter, introduced segments out of order, and introduced himself twice in under two minutes.
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