CBS News appointed Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d on Wednesday, charging him with taking on ABC\u2019s dominant David Muir on one of the flagship shows for broadcast television.<\/p>\n
Dokoupil, who has been part of the \u201cCBS Mornings\u201d team since 2019, will start his new job on Jan. 5. He replaces the anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who both announced they were leaving the network in recent months.<\/p>\n
Dokoupil is the first major hire for Bari Weiss, the Free Press founder who was appointed CBS News editor-in-chief this fall after the network\u2019s corporate takeover by Paramount.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media,\u201d Weiss said. \u201cTony Dokoupil is the person to win it back. That\u2019s because he believes in old school journalistic values \u2014 asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s got a challenge. The \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d has long ranked third among the broadcast network evening news shows, and this year has just over half the audience of ABC\u2019s \u201cWorld News Tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dokoupil, 44, who is married to NBC News\u2019 Katy Tur, has been with CBS News since 2016. He worked at MSNBC prior to that, and wrote for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He hosts a weekly streaming show, \u201cThe Uplift,\u201d about positive news stories and wrote the memoir, \u201cThe Last Pirate: A Father, His Son and the Golden Age of Marijuana,\u201d about his father\u2019s life as a drug smuggler.<\/p>\n
CBS News reprimanded<\/a> Dokoupil following a contentious interview about Israel and the Palestinians with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on Sept. 30, 2024. Speaking to Coates about an essay he wrote, Dokoupil said it \u201cwould not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist\u201d and asked Coates what offended him about the existence of a Jewish state.<\/p>\n Then-CBS News chief Wendy McMahon said at the time that \u201cour job is to serve our audience without bias or perceived bias.\u201d A phone call of McMahon discussing the issue with CBS staff members was leaked to the Free Press \u2014 edited by Weiss.<\/p>\n Promising viewers a commitment to \u201cthe plain truth\u201d<\/p>\n In a statement, Dokoupil said Wednesday that \u201cafter 20 years of journalism, traveling through all 50 states and talking with people in hundreds of far-flung American places, I realize why a country this big needs a show this ambitious.\u201d He promised viewers \u201ca commitment to trust and the plain truth.\u201d<\/p>\n During the search for a new \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d anchor, Weiss reached out to people outside of the network, including Bret Baier at Fox News Channel and Anderson Cooper, who reports for CBS\u2019 \u201c60 Minutes\u201d along with his nightly anchor job at CNN.<\/p>\n Baier is a competitor, and an uncomfortably close one at that: his Fox evening newscast averages 3 million viewers a night, compared to the 4.04 million at the \u201cCBS Evening News,\u201d and has beaten CBS head to head 11 times this year, according to the Nielsen company.<\/p>\n Once king of the hill in Walter Cronkite\u2019s era, the \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d fell to third place in nightly news viewership during Dan Rather\u2019s long tenure. That status hasn\u2019t changed through the lengthening list of his successors: Katie Couric, Jeff Glor, Scott Pelley, Norah O\u2019Donnell and the team of Dickerson and DuBois.<\/p>\n This year, Muir\u2019s ABC newscast has averaged 7.83 million viewers a night, with the \u201cNBC Nightly News\u201d anchored by Tom Llamas has 6.19 million, Nielsen said.<\/p>\n Worse for CBS, the gap has widened. The ABC newscast is down 2% in viewers over 2024 and NBC is down 3%, while the \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d is down 16 percent.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http:\/\/x.com\/dbauder<\/a> and https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/dbauder.bsky.social<\/a>.<\/p>\n