When CBS News, under Skydance and David Ellison, put opinion journalist Bari Weiss in charge last year, the theory of the case was clearly to move the news division’s political orientation closer to the center, while also being less critical of Donald Trump. The idea was for CBS to retain its current audience while also adding some more centrist or conservative viewers.
Judging by the numbers, it doesn’t look like that strategy is working, at least for CBS’s flagship newscast.
Per Variety, the ratings for CBS Evening News, now anchored by Tony Dokoupil, have fallen below the 4 million benchmark. This puts CBS in a distant third place behind its network rivals.
“CBS Evening News” viewership has fallen below 4 million since Tony Dokoupil took over as anchor. By comparison, ABC’s “World News Tonight” draws nearly 8.48 million viewers. https://t.co/G2byFr7hbL
— Variety (@Variety) March 17, 2026
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“Viewership for the program has once again dropped below 4 million, a critical demarcation point that previously spurred alarm at the Paramount Skydance news division,” Variety reported. “CBS News recently scrapped a version of ‘CBS Evening News’ anchored by Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson after the program shed audience and fell below 4 million viewers on many weeknights.”
“The overall audience for the program for the five days ended March 13 stood at nearly 3.83 million, according to data from Nielsen, and at 468,000 among viewers between 25 and 54, the demographic most coveted by advertisers,” Variety reported.
Audiences for nightly network newscasts have been declining for many years. But ABC’s World News Tonight currently averages 8.48 million viewers, more than double CBS’s number. NBC Nightly News averages 6.51 million viewers.
Per CBS, “one reason Dokoupil was moved from a perch on “CBS Mornings” to become anchor of the show is because CBS News executives worried they were falling further behind ABC’s ‘World News Tonight’ and NBC’s ‘NBC Nightly News’ with Dickerson and DuBois, who led a show that focused more heavily on enterprise stories and news features than it did on breaking headlines. Now those concerns are poised to rise anew.”
Meanwhile, with Paramount emerging earlier this month as the winner of the auction for Warner Bros. Discovery, CBS News and CNN would end up under the same corporate roof, if the merger is finalized. But the question will become whether the strategy that seems to not be working at CBS will be expanded to CNN.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
