The headline read, “It’s a new day at CBS with a reimagined CBS Evening News.”
That headline is not from this month, but January of 2025.
And the fact that, a year later, it’s still a new day at CBS with yet another reimagined “CBS Evening News” says a lot about the tumult at the network, and legacy broadcast news in general.
The big three — CBS, ABC and NBC — each face steep challenges from the ever expanding choices that consumers have to keep up with the news. And yet none of the legacy networks seem inclined to pull the plug on the evening newscast, a fixture of their programming since the 1940s, despite a declining audience that the Los Angeles Times has likened to “a slow melting glacier.”
Collectively, evening news shows lost 1 million viewers between 2024 and 2025, according to Nielsen. And “CBS Evening News” is faring the worst of the big three.
That’s one reason that Bari Weiss was hired last year to oversee the news operation, and why so many people have their eyes on the latest iteration of the “CBS Evening News.” With a new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, touring the country and promising coverage that represents all of America, the show is a microcosm of what Weiss intends to do for CBS overall.
But with the attention comes heightened scrutiny that has not been favorable.
In coverage of the launch, Dokoupil, in his first solo anchoring job, has been described as “MAGA coded” and mocked for glaring mistakes. An experienced producer has been fired. A newsroom skeptical of the changes at the network is leaking Weiss memos, which land on social media without nuance or context.
Moreover, there’s an even greater challenge the newscast faces in the 24/7 news cycle. Americans don’t sit down at the end of the day to watch a news show like people did a half-century ago; they keep up with news in real time with breaking news alerts and social media feeds.
“The days when a small handful of professional news organizations can draw the attention of the majority of the U.S. public are, for better or worse, over,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, the Oscar H. Gandy emeritus professor of communication and democracy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
That doesn’t mean the news organizations are not trying. And in the broadcast arena, CBS is getting the lion’s share of attention right now, although perhaps not in the ways that Weiss wants.
‘First day, big problems’
Dokoupil’s first show was officially Jan. 5, but he debuted a few days early because of the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela. The first week featured verbal and visual missteps, which Dokoupil acknowledged by saying on the air, “First day, big problems.” The show became fodder for jokes at the Golden Globes awards show, and Dokoupil was widely criticized for what some saw as favorable treatment of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Lost in the punchlines was that CBS was landing big names for the broadcasts, and not just people in the Trump administration. And the network was both nimble and ambitious, sending Dokoupil on a 10-day nationwide tour that was interrupted not just by mistakes but by breaking news. A scheduled stop in Denver, for example, was rerouted to Minneapolis after the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent.
All the while, media critics and gossip columnists were weighing in, the latter speculating about the effects of Dokoupil’s new visibility on the career of his wife, MS NOW correspondent Katy Tur.
Longtime journalist and media analyst Margaret Sullivan has been following the changes at CBS and writing about them on her Substack, “American Crisis.” She was appalled by the newscast’s treatment of the five-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, writing, “It was almost kissed off altogether, but the attention it did get was rife with appalling ‘both sides are equal’ commentary.”
Sullivan was also critical of the newscast’s promises to its audience, which includes the declaration “We love America,” saying that journalists can show their patriotism by being willing to challenge authority, holding the powerful accountable and favoring reporting over punditry.
“No American-flag pins on lapels are necessary. No jingoistic headlines about illegal raids are welcome. And, please, no fawning interviews of people in powerful positions,” Sullivan wrote.
Is that a question of approach or execution? Can’t a journalist be objective, critical and patriotic? This has been debated for decades, most fervently in the months after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when many people, even journalists, were wearing U.S. flag pins.
Dan Rather, who succeeded Walter Cronkite at CBS, chose not to, but explained at the time, “I have the flag burned in my heart, and I have ever since infancy. And I just don’t feel the need to do it. It doesn’t feel right to me.” Rather also wept after visiting Ground Zero, and co-authored a book about patriotism. Yet he was widely respected as a tough and fair journalist.
Weiss, who famously resigned from The New York Times in 2020 over what she said was “hostility to free speech and open inquiry,” started The Free Press to offer what she believed was missing in America’s leading news organizations.
In 2023, she wrote, “The Free Press began as a question: do Americans still want real journalism? Fearless, fair, independent journalism that treats readers like adults? Journalism that presents the facts — even the uncomfortable ones —and allows people to draw their own conclusions rather than serving them premasticated mush?"
Americans did — and so did Paramount Skydance, which bought The Free Press last year and installed Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News, despite critics howling about her lack of experience.
What happens with “CBS Evening News” is widely seen as her first big test.
Why conservatives distrust media
There’s no question that Dokoupil, perhaps with Weiss’s help, is landing big names, including President Donald Trump, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
And despite the efforts of some to paint the newscast as the new “Trump TV,” most analysts point out that Dokoupil is making an effort to be fair and to include multiple perspectives. The problem is, for many journalists, trying too hard to present both sides can be almost as much of a problem as showing only one side. That’s why “bothsidesism” is often denounced in the industry.
The New York Times’s television critic, James Poniewozik, reviewing Dokoupil’s start, said, “It’s not that Dokoupil and Weiss have made ‘The CBS Evening News’ into Fox News II. In broad strokes, it is still much like every network newscast. But it seems to be taking pains to show that it is willing to listen to conservatives and challenge liberals.”
That, presumably, is the point. Conservatives have long distrusted media more than liberals, believing that their viewpoints have not been represented. (One YouGov/American Enterprise Institute poll found that 92% of people who voted for Trump in 2020 agreed that “the mainstream media today is just a part of the Democratic Party.”)
“A lot has changed since the first person sat in this chair, but for me, the biggest difference is, people do not trust us like they used to,” Dokoupil said in an introductory video released Jan. 1. “And it’s not just us. It’s all of legacy media.”
Of that video, Poniewozik observed, “It was less mea culpa than they-a culpa, a green evening news anchor throwing the media, including his own employer, one of TV’s most storied news organizations, under the bus before his first day.”
That sense of betrayal underlies some of the more scathing news coverage, including articles about Weiss’s decision to hold the “60 Minutes” piece on El Salvador prisons, and those that quote from her internal memos. (The most recent leak, reported by The New York Times, was that Weiss told her producers, “Let’s make sure every single night has something with viral potential. The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*.”)
CBS, however, is not courting news organizations, but everyday Americans. And how they will respond over time is anyone’s guess right now. There has been some positive feedback, including from one viewer who pronounced it “measurably better.”
‘CBS Evening News’ ratings
In the first batch of ratings, the “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil” saw good news and bad.
The good news is that ratings were up from what they were in December, but down from where they were a year ago. And the latter headline was trumpeted across social media by people who dislike Weiss and where she is taking the network.
Per Deadline, the newscast averaged 4.17 million viewers in Dokoupil’s first week, compared to 5.4 million a year ago and 4.03 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, when the show was anchored by John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who succeeded Norah O’Donnell.
But Deadline noted that all of the Big Three saw audiences decline in the past year.
With an average of 8.08 million viewers, ABC’s “World News Tonight” had nearly twice the audience of “CBS Evening News With Tony Dokoupil,” but its viewership was down from 8.87 million last year.
In second place, “NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas” saw an average of 6.73 million viewers, “down 9% from 7.38 million during the same week in 2025,” according to Deadline’s report.
CBS presented the ratings differently, emphasizing an increase in engagement in its articles and on YouTube, which underscores another change in television news over the past six decades: Networks aren’t just looking at how many people sit down to watch a broadcast, but also how they engage with the content in other ways.
Nonetheless, this was seen by many media observers as spin, and several, including University of Maine professor Michael Socolow (whose father was a producer for Walter Cronkite), predicted that CBS ratings will decline further as the year goes on. “CBS’s ratings in February will reach historic lows,” he predicted on X, adding that NBC will get a boost from the Winter Olympics.
The future of broadcast news
It’s not just that the viewership of evening broadcasts are shrinking, but their audiences are graying. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024, the prized 18- to 49-year-old demographic no longer has the cache that it once did, because there are fewer people of that age watching TV. They’re getting news on their phones or social-media streams. TikTok, for some, is the new Evening News.
When Pew Research Center looked at the median ages of news consumers by outlet, it found that CBS had the oldest audience, ahead of only Breitbart and Newsmax. The median age of the CBS viewer was 58; NBC, 57; and ABC, 55. (The youngest viewers were found at Univision and Telemundo, Spanish-language networks, and at the conservative media company The Daily Wire, Pew found.)
The graying of the audience, and the rise of new media, helps to explain why, although the U.S. population has increased by 60 million since 2000, the evening news audience has declined by half, Delli Carpini, at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an email. But the standards of news gathering and reporting should stay the same, regardless of the format in which it is presented, he added.
“What we clearly do need as a country are professional journalists and professional news organizations that can shine light on important public issues of the day and do so in a way that provides viewers with useful and useable facts and with a range of views and perspectives. These journalists and journalism organizations need to be free to report in a way that is insulated from both corporate and political pressure; that can speak truth to power,” Delli Carpini said.
He added: “Whether a half-hour or hour of ‘Evening News’ is the right or best vehicle for this kind of journalism is very much an open question. What ultimately matters is not whether a particular news organization or a particular news format survives, but whether high quality journalism survives.”