Just weeks into Tony Dokoupil’s run as the new face of CBS Evening News, the numbers are already sending a brutal message. Viewers are not sticking around. Advertisers are not impressed. And CBS is now staring at its weakest January performance in more than two decades.
Dokoupil’s second week as anchor brought only a slight bump from his debut. The program averaged 4.19 million total viewers and just 584,000 adults between 25 and 54. That may look like movement on paper, but it does little to change the bigger picture. CBS remains far behind its rivals and locked into last place in the nightly news race.
ABC and NBC are not even close.
During the same week, World News Tonight pulled in more than 8 million viewers, while NBC Nightly News drew nearly 6.7 million. CBS barely cleared half of ABC’s audience. The gap is not narrowing. It is becoming structural.
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The comparison looks even worse when measured against CBS’s own past.
At this point last year, the evening broadcast averaged over 5.1 million viewers. Since Dokoupil took over in early January, that figure has collapsed to roughly 4.3 million a night. Among adults aged 25 to 54, the decline has been sharper, with as much as one-fifth of that key group disappearing in just days.
That puts CBS at its lowest rated January since at least the year 2000.
The network did catch a short burst of attention one night when NBC preempted its newscast for an NBA game. With fewer options available, CBS jumped to 6.38 million viewers. But the spike was artificial. The very next nights returned to the same downward slope.
Meanwhile, 60 Minutes ran into its own ratings trouble.
A highly anticipated segment examining conditions inside El Salvador’s CECOT prison finally aired after being shelved weeks earlier. The story focused on Venezuelan deportees sent there under the Trump-era immigration policies. But the timing worked against CBS. The episode aired opposite an NFL playoff game that pulled more than 40 million viewers.
The result was brutal.
Only about 5.1 million people watched 60 Minutes that night, far below its usual average. CBS quietly labeled the episode 60 Minutes Presents, a move that prevented the low number from officially counting against the show’s season average. The optics were hard to ignore.
For CBS News, these struggles are happening at the worst possible moment.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
