When Tony Dokoupil finished his first official broadcast from New York as anchor of the CBS Evening News on Monday, he signed off with, “And that’s another day in America.”
Then, he added, “I can’t believe they let me keep that line.”
The casual aside was a bit of irreverence for the evening broadcast, but it underscored one facet of the network’s decision to choose Dokoupil as its sixth anchor in the past decade. At 45, he is the youngest of the three broadcast news anchors, a once superstar assignment that long ago lost its voice-of-God influence. With his heavy emphasis on social media in recent days, Dokoupil seems determined to break through to new audiences, but some of his remarks have also drawn criticisms and questions about the new direction of CBS News under editor in chief Bari Weiss.
Even though the influence of evening news anchors isn’t what it once was, the selection of Dokoupil, who has been co-host of CBS Mornings, makes him the face of the division, anchoring not just the evening broadcast but special reports and special events.
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With the Venezuelan invasion on Saturday morning, Dokoupil anchored CBS Evening News that evening, so this wasn’t his first stint as permanent anchor. But it did give a feel for the direction that the network is going.
The opener on Monday started with headline previews of stories to come, a device that has worked well for the ratings leader, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir, but was sidelined when CBS relaunched its evening newscast a year ago under John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. That led to even lower ratings, making another change a priority for the new leadership.
Wearing a dark suit and tie, and on a newsroom set, Dokoupil went to six different stories on the U.S. operation to seize Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife.
The first segment featured Matt Gutman, recently hired away from ABC, on Maduro’s arraignment in Manhattan. The second segment, from senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe, pointed out the conflicting statements from Donald Trump and his administration on just who was in charge of the country. Other segments spotlighted the new interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and opposition leader María Corina Machado, as well as interviews with Venezuelans in the U.S. and how they felt about the U.S. operation.
The Venezuela coverage finished with a segment featuring business analyst Jill Schlesinger, talking about what the U.S. invasion of the oil-rich nation could mean for how much Americans pay at the pump, noting that it will take billions in investments from U.S. companies.
Left unmentioned was whether such a seizure of another country’s natural resources means to U.S. foreign policy, whether the Trump administration has done much planning, or if it is even legal. Rather, it was treated as a business story.
“I really think we got to set out sights to the long term, meaning not days, not months, but years really,” Schlesinger told Dokoupil.
After she made the point that “the global economy will dominate, as it always does,” Dokoupil ended her segment by telling her “You dominate. Appreciate it.”
Dokoupil’s more casual language seems to be part of a plan to try to make the newscast more accessible, something that he has outlined in a series of social media posts in recent days. In one video, he told viewers that “on too many stories the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you.”
That said, the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil so far has relied quite a bit on the perspective of advocates, as is understandable with a major breaking story, and it’s unclear just what relying on the “average American” will look like.
Given the little time there is in a 30-minute broadcast, Dokoupil’s social media comments may be nothing much more than a marketing effort.
But they are undoubtedly viewed with an extra level of scrutiny not because of the new anchor, but because of the way that Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount went down last year.
As it sought approval for the transaction, the old Paramount owners settled a Trump lawsuit against CBS News, even though its lawyers had previously deemed it baseless. Then, as it sought the FCC greenlight, Skydance agreed to hire an ombudsman to take complaints about the network’s news coverage. The person selected, Kenneth Weinstein, is the former head of a rightward Washington think tank, the Hudson Institute.
Then, last month, Weiss pulled a 60 Minutes segment on Trump administration deportations, even though it was already finished and promoted to be broadcast. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi protested that the decision was political; Weiss said that the segment was “not ready” and needed more principals, or Trump administration officials.
All of the incidents have put the focus on Weiss’ each and every move in the news division, and whether it is somehow softening toward Trump at a time when Paramount may need his administration’s approval if it succeeds in its hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
The concerns of corporate interference were great enough that Dokoupil, in his social media remarks last week, also pledged to viewers that “you come first. Not advertisers. Not politicians. Not corporate interests. And, yes, that does include the corporate owners of CBS. I report for you.”
What’s unclear is how far Dokoupil will go in another declaration he made on social media. In response to one commentator lamenting the news division since the era of Walter Cronkite. Dokoupil wrote, “I can promise you we’ll be more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or any one else of his era.” The network has not said whether complaints that the ombudsman receives about the Evening News will be made public.
In his first official stint, Dokoupil was up front about what was going on during a glitch in the broadcast. As he appeared to be ready to go to a story about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, an image of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) appeared on the screen. “First day, first day. Big problems here,” Dokoupil said, shaking his head. Glitches do happen — or, to out it in perspective, just another day in America.