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.
