What's Killing CBS Evening News in Plain Sight
Bari Weiss rewrote the teleprompter on night one. It's been downhill from there.
It’s time for a wellness check on CBS News.
What’s happening at CBS Evening News right now looks like a slow-motion car wreck. And a Vanity Fair deep-dive published this week confirms what a lot of us in the industry have been watching with our hands over our eyes.
The short version: Bari Weiss took over CBS News, installed Tony Dokoupil as the evening anchor, and in the first week alone, the wheels started flying off.
Night One
Weiss walked into the newsroom on Dokoupil’s first Monday and asked to see the script. That’s not how this works. The network chief does not edit scripts. But she’s the boss, and so producers — after objecting — handed it over. She added lines to a segment on the U.S. military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro, framing Trump’s operation as a strategic masterstroke against China, Russia, and Iran.
Then someone put her edits in the teleprompter twice.
Dokoupil, on live television, stumbled through several excruciating seconds of duplicated copy. “First day, big problems here,” he told viewers.
One former CBS News anchor told Vanity Fair: “What a disaster. Honestly, I would’ve f---ing killed her.”
That was just the first night.
Every news anchor from the smallest TV station to the big networks has stories about teleprompter screw-ups. We’ve had them in radio news, too. I’ve had writers and producers struggling to get breaking news in the system fast, with information being updated on the fly, and the inevitable errors that rarely slip through. But I have never, ever had a script tampered with by a boss right before it showed up on my screen. The anchor chair is supposed to be sacred ground.
Night Two Was Worse
The fifth anniversary of January 6 came on Dokoupil’s second night. He personally rewrote the script to frame the coverage around Trump’s revisionist account of the Capitol riot.
Then, after the break, he delivered a segment on Marco Rubio memes and signed off with an ad-libbed line: “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida Man.”
The White House loved it.
Nobody at CBS did.
“It just alienates the audience,” one CBS News journalist told Vanity Fair. “I don’t think even a MAGA Republican wants to see that in their news.” The criticism isn’t partisan — it’s professional. Evening news isn’t the morning show. You don’t salute the Secretary of State.
The Exits
Scott MacFarlane, the network’s justice correspondent who spent years covering January 6 and its aftermath, spoke up on the editorial call the morning after Dokoupil’s J6 coverage, urging the newsroom to stop putting false claims on the air. A source familiar with his thinking says he found it “highly objectionable and personally gutting.” Within weeks, he was gone.
Night four of Dokoupil’s debut week: the number two producer on the show was escorted out by corporate security. Javier Guzman — nine-year CBS veteran, one of the most experienced people on the broadcast — was told he was fired because he wasn’t “sufficiently on board” with the new direction.
Ten staffers have left the Evening News this year alone.
The Numbers
Here’s where it gets existential. In the first quarter of 2026, the Evening News lost three full share points compared to the same period last year. One broadcast insider put it bluntly: every percentage point of share a network loses to the competition represents about $10 million in annual losses.
That’s $30 million. In one quarter.
And the audience Weiss is apparently chasing — the right-leaning viewer who abandoned legacy media — isn’t coming back to CBS because the editorial aperture shifted ten degrees. Those viewers are entrenched with Fox or scattered across the digital ecosystem. They’re not going to start watching CBS because Tony Dokoupil saluted Marco Rubio.
All that’s being accomplished is that the legacy viewers who were there because they trusted CBS are jumping ship.
Who Is Tony Dokoupil?
I don’t think Dokoupil is the villain of this story. Maybe he deserved the shot. Maybe he didn’t. But he’s being asked to execute a vision on a stage with higher stakes than anything he’s navigated before, with a boss standing just off-camera coaching his lines, perhaps taking advantage of his inexperience behind a desk that big.
The Vanity Fair piece describes Weiss as literally out of frame during his introductory video manifesto, coaching him on what to say — while he criticized “legacy media” for relying on “academics and elites.” The self-awareness deficit was immediately noted inside the building.
And then there’s the Cronkite comment. Responding to a viewer who pushed back on his mission statement, Dokoupil wrote that his show would be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era.”
Walter Cronkite anchored CBS News for 19 years. He was the most trusted man in America.
One former CBS executive who worked with him says Dokoupil “completely lost the room.”
The Deeper Problem
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Bari Weiss has a theory. The theory is that what’s killing legacy broadcast news is a perceived liberal bias, and that shifting the dial rightward will bring audiences back.
It’s a plausible hypothesis if you squint real hard.
To be fair, there are markets where that repositioning could find traction — one CBS affiliate owner in Tulsa told Vanity Fair he’s seen good numbers in the Midwest.
But the Evening News isn’t a regional affiliate. It’s the flagship. And the audience that built that broadcast over 50 years didn’t leave because of bias. They left because the media landscape fractured. They left because they have a thousand other options. You don’t win them back by doing a meme segment on Marco Rubio.
Vital Signs
So: how is the patient doing?
Not well. Ratings declining. Staff departing. Newsroom demoralized. Anchor still finding his footing. Boss editing the teleprompter on night one.
CBS, according to insiders, feels like it has no choice but to keep Dokoupil in the chair — they’ve burned through too many anchors to absorb another change. So the experiment continues, and the Evening News carries on, trying to be something it was never designed to be.
Which brings us to the question nobody at CBS wants to ask out loud: with David Ellison about to complete his takeover of Paramount Global, what happens next door at CNN? Does the Weiss playbook travel? Does Ellison try to out-Fox Fox News and turn CNN into something that a decade’s worth of trained Fox viewers will suddenly embrace?
That’s a fantasy. And if the Evening News is any indication, it’s an expensive one.
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