You have to go way back in broadcast history to recall the time when a change in anchors at the network evening news was a big deal. CBS’s decision in 1981 to early-retire Walter Cronkite and replace him with Dan Rather prompted front-page headlines. For most of the next two decades, Rather, NBC’s Tom Brokaw, and ABC’s Peter Jennings were familiar fixtures in American homes, the eventual departure of each setting off high-stakes intrigue over the choice of their successors.
No more. Today, as the evening-news audience has steadily eroded — to less than half of what it was in the early ‘80s — it’s doubtful that many viewers could even name the three journalists currently manning the anchor desk on the evening news. So at least one thing that Bari Weiss has accomplished, since taking over as editor-in-chief of CBS News last fall, is to put the evening news back in the spotlight: installing a new anchor, former morning-news co-host Tony Dokoupil, as part of a revamp of the network’s flagship newscast.
The show has had a bumpy start. Dokoupil’s debut broadcast was marred by an embarrassing technical glitch; he’s drawn criticism for softball treatment of Trump cabinet members Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio; and ratings haven’t budged, still well back in third place behind ABC’s No. 1-ranked World News Tonight and the NBC Nightly News.
This has only bolstered the conventional media wisdom: that the network evening news is an outmoded relic, all but irrelevant in an age of nonstop, saturation news coverage on cable, websites, social media, podcasts, and more.
Yet, by all logic, just the opposite should be true. The very firehose of news and opinion that engulfs us every day has made the evening newscasts more crucial than ever. All three have adopted a similar format: front-loading the show with an extended 14 or 15-minute opening segment covering the day’s top stories, while relegating the commercials and fluffy features to the back half of the show. For my money, those first 15 minutes are the most important news view of the day.
They rarely break news, or tell us much that we haven’t already read or seen, over and over again, throughout the day. And they have their ratings-driven quirks: severe weather in any part of the country is apt to get breathless, top-of-the-show treatment. But they are a rare island of calm in a chaotic, agenda-driven news environment: a sober, relatively “objective” (to use that much disparaged term) editorial effort to sort through the clutter, to gauge the relative importance of the day’s developments, to put it all in some kind of perspective.
And they’re doing it, not for the news junkies, Beltway insiders, and addicts of Politico, but for the vast majority of casual news consumers in the rest of the country. Despite their shrinking audience, the three network newscasts together still reach around 20 million viewers each night. By comparison, the average combined audience for CNN, Fox, and MSNBC/MS NOW in prime time is less than 4 million.
The critics have not been kind to the new CBS Evening News, but I’ve found it quite watchable. Dokoupil, with his well-coiffed good looks and smooth, no-nonsense delivery, might be an AI version of the perfectly nondescript, inoffensive TV news reader. But he’s easier to take than the hyper-intense Tom Llamas on NBC, or the stiff, vaguely Ted Baxterish mien of David Muir on ABC.
The show moves more briskly than its competitors (its opening teaser section is only half as long as those bloated, wasteful two-minute intros on both NBC and ABC). Dokoupil’s first-week interview with President Trump — the two standing awkwardly face to face in a noisy Ford Motor plant — was no more or less revelatory than most of his counterparts’ similar efforts. And aside from the night he interviewed his own mother for a story on grandparents and grandkids (part of an upbeat closing segment dubbed The Good Stuff), he’s avoided gimmicky efforts to cozy up to the audience.
Weiss — the right-leaning, anti-woke columnist and founder of the website The Free Press — is being closely watched for signs she’s steering CBS in a more Trump-friendly direction. Watching the show for the past month, I can’t say I’ve seen any evidence of that — though there have been a couple of eyebrow raisers. Introducing a report on Trump’s January 20 press conference touting his first-year achievements, Dokoupil led with two headlines: Trump defends ICE’s activities in Minnesota, while “adding that he felt terribly about the death of Renee Good” — omitting the obvious reason (noted by many others): he had just learned that Good’s father was a Trump voter.
In a meeting with CBS News staffers last month, Weiss did not exactly give the evening news a ringing vote of confidence. “Our strategy has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” she said. “If we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”
Her ambitions lie elsewhere: she’s hired a host of new contributors (including some conservative columnists for The Free Press), presumably to provide more ideological “balance”; launched a series of prime-time town-hall interviews (next up: JD Vance); and insisted that the news division must expand its reach in the new digital universe. “I am here,” she told the staff, “to make CBS News fit for purpose in the 21st century.”
The question is whether this new-media maven can find a way to adapt, rather than abandon, an old-media standby that still has a vital role to play amid the daily bombardment of news that threatens to overwhelm us. Without it, I’m afraid, we’re all toast.
Richard Zoglin 