When Bari Weiss took over CBS News and installed Tony Dokoupil as the face of its evening broadcast, the pitch was essentially: trust us, we know what viewers want. Several months and a historic ratings collapse later, it turns out viewers have a different opinion.
CBS Evening News has now logged its second-lowest-rated April this century, along with its weakest performance ever in the key 25 to 54 demographic.
That slide shows up clearly in the core audience figures. The program is averaging about 3.7 million viewers, a level that once would have triggered internal alarms when it crossed the 4 million mark.
The pressure point is even sharper in the advertiser-coveted 25 to 54 group. Last week, the show averaged just 539,000 viewers in that bracket, well below the 600,000 threshold often treated as a comfort line for ad buyers.
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For comparison, ABC’s World News Tonight is averaging 8.33 million viewers, while NBC Nightly News is pulling 6.29 million. Dokoupil isn’t losing to the competition so much as he’s watching it from a different zip code.
The situation did not exactly start with momentum. On his maiden broadcast in January, Dokoupil’s teleprompter failed mid-show, prompting him to announce on live television, “first day, big problems here” – a sentence that has since functioned as something of a thesis statement for the whole venture. A high-profile interview with Trump that same month couldn’t move the needle either.
The problems go deeper than one bad debut. One veteran executive told Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter: “This isn’t what a turnaround looks like. This is what a train wreck looks like,” while another said Weiss’ “decisions have turned off even more of their shrinking audience. These declines are part of a larger and deeper crisis at CBS News.”
Industry insiders have pointed to the same gap. A source told the New York Post: “You can’t do David Muir lite. When s–t hits the fan, CBS doesn’t have heavyweights like Martha Raddatz, Pierre Thomas or Jonathan Karl.” The implication being that Dokoupil, for all his polish, doesn’t quite register as a serious anchor when things get serious.
Dokoupil also managed to alienate his own newsroom before he ever sat behind the desk. He posted a video in January accusing the “legacy media” of having “missed the story” by putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you” – a message that landed exactly as well as you’d expect inside the building he was about to walk into.
“I just don’t even understand how you could say something like that,” a former CBS executive told Vanity Fair. “He completely lost the room.”
CBS News has pushed back on the narrative, with a spokesperson insisting that “Tony Dokoupil is an exceptional talent and experienced journalist,” and noting the show is technically up two percent compared to April 2025.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
