Media

… [T]he Ellison & Co. thesis for CBS News is rational enough: The three broadcast networks have long converged around the same distribution platform and a center-left ideological locus. If you’re the perennial third-place, money-losing network, pivoting to a wide-open center-right lane with a digital media entrepreneur makes quite a bit of sense, particularly in America circa 2026. Of course, executing on that will take time: per CBS, Tony’s debut episode was up 9 percent in total viewership and 20 percent in the demo compared to previous Monday broadcasts. But it was also down by hefty double-digit percentages when compared to every previous anchor debut going back to Katie Couric.

Anyway, past network news scandalettes have proven that things get worse before they get better. Even if Bari has Ellison’s support, she’s vastly outnumbered by her employees, none of whom were consulted on this vision shift…

Bari doesn’t put much stock in the soft leadership aspects of the job. She privately chafes at the laziness and mediocrity of some staffers and has told multiple people that she’ll fire anyone who isn’t willing to work hard and get on board with her leadership, per sources who heard her say it directly. (Presumably, she doesn’t think it takes 40 people to make a TV show.) Staffers also say she has at times been visibly frustrated by how hard it is for her bookers to land big-name guests—a task, as you’ll recall, that she has often taken up herself by pulling out her phone in meetings and texting sources directly. Finally, for a journalist who claims to champion a free press—and who once published an audio recording she obtained of an internal CBS News meeting—she seems remarkably miffed by the leaks coming out of her own shop. (Bari did not comment for this piece.)

Your read on these details is, of course, a Rorschach test. Surely Ellison & Co. could do without these headaches—but, from their vantage point, Bari is doing just fine, has every right to be frustrated with the existing complacency, and probably has license to fire whomever she wants. And this drama is merely a minor nuisance amid the quest for an $108 billion deal. It’s hard to imagine them buckling anytime soon: Whether or not she can program 20 minutes of error-free television per day, Bari enmeshed herself with the mogul class by proving that she didn’t care what other people thought—defenestrating herself before others could. That’s what the money is for, and these guys know that better than anyone.

The “deal” Byers references is nepo-baby David Ellison’s bid for Warner Brothers / Discovery, which is going so well that Weiss’ inability to handle her debut at CBS have been cited as yet another reason for WB/D to stay with its preference for Ellison rival Netflix, if you’re keeping score.

Is this for real? My god what a f*ck up. His read started rough, way to nervous & uneven but the end here is about as big a mess as you’ll see on the network evening news. Truth is that every local news anchor in the country had a better show tonight than this guy…

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— @NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) (@newsjennifer.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 10:38 PM

Per Variety columnist Daniel D’Addario, “Tony Dokoupil’s ‘CBS Evening News’ Debut Is an Inauspicious Sign of Where CBS News Is Headed”

… The broadcast journalist, who since 2019 had been CBS’ morning show co-anchor, came into the seat once held by Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Katie Couric with plenty of attitude, saying in a recent social-media comment that he would be “more accountable and more transparent” than had been legendary anchor Cronkite and, on New Year’s Day, sharing a video in which he declared his broadcast had often “missed the story” by privileging “the perspective of advocates and not the average American.”

All of which conveniently mirrored the career-long attitude of Dokoupil’s new boss; Bari Weiss, the opinion journalist brought in last year as CBS News’ editor-in-chief by new Paramount leader David Ellison, has long evinced a relentless focus on presenting her perspective as that of the common man, no matter how many of her fellow Sun Valley attendees may coincidentally share it…

And in his official first broadcast on Jan. 5, Dokoupil betrayed a Weissian willingness to bulldoze past that which might seem too untidy for whatever hypothetical viewer he and his editor have in mind. Dokoupil blandly stated to the camera that a Russian-Chinese-Iranian base of influence in Venezuela will be destabilized by the U.S. military action, without citing any source or consulting any guest; a brief interview with a financial expert about how the events in South America will affect the price of gasoline never broached the notion of whether the U.S. extracting Venezuelan petroleum is legal. Perhaps that might have constituted consulting advocates, and not the average American. But it would have been part of telling the whole story.

Not that that seems to be Dokoupil’s strong suit, or his interest. Elsewhere, in a segment about health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly announced and seismic shifts to the recommended vaccine schedule for children, Dokoupil began an interview with a CBS News medical journalist by asking what this expert would say to “parents out there who are celebrating,” because they thought their kids were obliged to be injected with too many vaccines. He ended the segment by declaring “So, parents are going to have some options for themselves!” when, to a large portion of the audience, the precise opposite is true — they’ll now need a physician consult to obtain a vaccine for their child that was once more easily obtained. Dokoupil thanked his guest and announced, brashly, “You clarified it for us.” The guest could be said to have tried his best, despite Dokoupil.

Weiss has been reported to have pursued Fox’s Bret Baier and CNN’s Anderson Cooper for this role, but after both stars wisely chose to keep their sinecures, she likely had to choose from among the army she had — but Dokoupil lacks the charisma and aptitude to turn the “Evening News” into whatever it is she may want. He babbled confusedly, then fell silent, when a segment about Sen. Mark Kelly jumped ahead of a segment about Gov. Tim Walz in the lineup — the kind of shift an anchor is supposed to be able to handle without painfully long seconds of dead air. “First day, big problems here,” Dokoupil said with evident frustration…

Thankfully, just like parents, viewers have some options for themselves — and few, it seems likely, will choose this reboot. The hypothetical viewer who wishes their news were pitched at a more conservative tenor is super-served by Fox News and Newsmax; evening newscast viewership has been dropping across the board, and, in terms of comfort in the chair and ability to convey thought, Dokoupil has a way to go and will likely move in the wrong direction. Say this much, though: Weiss’ management of “60 Minutes” has so far been a tragedy, in that it is shattering the credibility and prestige of what remains to this day one of the signature, and most popular, programs of any type in American television. The “Evening News” has been ebbing into irrelevance for years for reasons entirely beyond political slant. Perhaps sequestering Dokoupil there might contain the damage that might be done by an anchor whose ambitious ability to see which way the wind blows has so far outstripped his broadcasting talent.

Even Larry Ellison might be embarrassed about son David’s smashing success here with CBS so far.

— @NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) (@newsjennifer.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 10:48 PM

Tom Ley, at Defector — “Tony Dokoupil Eats Heaps of Shit in First Week As CBS News Anchor”:

Last month, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss decided to make Tony Dokoupil, then the host of the network’s three-hour morning show, the new lead anchor on CBS Evening News. In any other circumstance, it might be hard to figure out how this promotion was issued to a guy whose job was to be a court jester for bleary-eyed Americans getting ready to go to work…

Put more directly: This moron got himself a fancy new job by being an ingratiating dipshit…

On Saturday, during an interview with former television host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it was hard to figure out in what ways Dokoupil was privileging the perspective of the average American. Given the opportunity to question one of the architects of an illegal kidnapping plot that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people, Dokoupil decided to help Hegseth cut a promo: “Mr. Secretary, today at the press conference, you said, and I’m going to say it slowly so I make sure I get it right, ‘Maduro effed around and found out.’ And that’s obviously a message not only to Maduro, but to many American adversaries around the world … What’s next here? What’s the message? Who did you have in mind when you said ‘eff around and find out,’ globally?”

Hey, Weiss was never looking for a news anchor capable of asking basic follow-up questions, or holding accountable anyone in a position of real power. She just wants a generic dope who shares her stupid, evil beliefs and will go on the news every night and be charming. Dokoupil has yet to clear that relatively low bar, though. Monday’s show featured several seconds of dead air after Dokoupil got confused about which news story he was supposed to be reading, and Tuesday’s edition ended with a bizarre segment in which Dokoupil spent way too long explaining a stupid right-wing meme to the audience for the sake of saluting Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the “ultimate Florida Man.” Even in 2015, this shit would have flopped.

Dokoupil’s performance so far fits neatly into Weiss’s larger project: molding CBS News into the kind of news organization that does the opposite of what it claims. Her goal isn’t to turn CBS Evening News into a program that prizes the perspective of average Americans over “elites”—how such a vague directive would be practically implemented isn’t even worth thinking about—but one that more efficiently broadcasts her own anxious, blinkered view of the world. The key to Weiss’s professional success has always been her self-absorption, her ability to convince herself, and those in positions of wealth and influence, that her own strange perspective is the dominant one.

This is an easier to trick to pull off when Weiss is talking to a captive audience of 100,000 iPad boomers, but her attempts to scale up are revealing that she simply does not know how to run an organization that actually has to report news. She can go on inventing spurious reasons to kill stories, insisting that anyone cares what Erika Kirk still has to say, and believing that being rude to Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only qualification a nightly news host requires, but the cracks are already starting to show.

Even very serious war journalist Spencer Ackerman couldn’t resist: “Watching Bari Weiss Murder Investigative Journalism at CBS”.