.jpg?trim=0,50,0,50&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Despite CBS News’ hype, Tony Dokoupil’s first week as evening anchor is a ratings dud – UK Times")
“We need to *be the news* for these 10 days,” CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss told staff in a note ahead of the much-ballyhooed two-week “Live From America” road show that would mark Tony Dokoupil’s debut as the CBS Evening News anchor.
And while Weiss and Dokoupil have very much made themselves the story amid this latest reboot of the nightly news program once manned by Walter Cronkite, all of that buzz – negative and otherwise – has not translated into television viewers.
According to Nielsen Media Research, the first week of CBS Evening News with Dokoupil at the helm averaged just 4.166 million total viewers and 533,000 in the coveted demographic of adults aged 25-54.
Upon the release of those numbers on Tuesday evening, CBS News attempted to frame the ratings as a victory in a celebratory press release, pointing out that Dokoupil was “surpassing prior season-to-date averages.” According to the network, Dokoupil’s first week was up 4 percent in total viewership and 8 percent in the key demo compared to the rest of the season for the program, which started in September.
The network also touted the amount of social media buzz and digital traffic the show had sparked since Dokoupil officially came aboard earlier this month, noting that CBS Evening News article traffic had grown 229 percent compared to 2025’s weekly average and YouTube minutes were up 58 percent.
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Hidden behind the network’s hype about social media buzz and digital views, as well as its spin about the Dokoupil-led evening show bringing in slightly more viewers than the perennially third-place broadcast had attracted in recent weeks, is the inconvenient fact that the CBS Evening News reboot landed with a ratings thud.
Compared to the same week last year, which saw Norah O’Donnell wrapping up her run as anchor with coverage of the California wildfires and the leadup to Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Dokoupil’s debut was down 20 percent in total viewership and 27 percent in the advertising demographic.
Meanwhile, compared to the debut week of the co-anchor duo Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson, who Dokoupil replaced after they spent less than a year behind the desk, CBS Evening News declined 23 percent in the adult demo and 13 percent in total viewership.
Nielsen also shows that when compared to the first quarter of last year, which largely included the DuBois/Dickerson team that oversaw sinking ratings at the weeknight program, the Dokoupil version was down 9 percent in total viewers and 19 percent in the 25-54 demographic.
Whatever viewers Dokoupil pulled in with his “official” debut on Monday – he anchored the Saturday night version of the show two days prior following the Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela – had already eroded by Friday.
Losing ground every night of the week, CBS Evening News fell under 4 million viewers on Friday and saw a decline of 15 percent in total viewership and 29 percent in the demographic compared to Monday. Additionally, Monday night’s broadcast at the start of week two of Dokoupil’s reign was down 8 percent week-over-week in total viewership and flat in the demo.
As Status News’ Oliver Darcy noted in his newsletter, the “numbers are awful,” even if one were to dismiss the year-over-year decline. With the full-court promotional effort CBS News put into hyping Dokoupil’s two-week “Live From America” road trip, staying flat compared to the past few weeks and months “would be somewhat of a failure,” especially with the network chartering a private plane to cart Dokoupil and his team from city to city.
“Weiss, taking a notably hands-on approach, has helped land bookings for the program. Under her direction, the network’s digital team has relentlessly promoted Dokoupil across its platforms,” Darcy additionally observed. “And CBS News leadership has fully embraced placing the anchor at the center of the story itself, with Dokoupil delivering on-air monologues about the loss of trust in the press, the ‘CBS Evening News’ issuing declarations of its love for America, and the social team even circulating a strange video of Dokoupil openly weeping during a hometown interview with a Miami affiliate.”
Making matters worse is that the other broadcast networks’ evening news programs absolutely walloped CBS Evening News during Dokoupil’s first week.
ABC’s World News Tonight, long the ratings winner in evening news, brought in 8.1 million total viewers, besting CBS by 94 percent and 86 percent in the key demo, in which it averaged an audience of 989,000.
NBC Nightly News, which recently brought in its own new anchor in Tom Llamas, pulled in 6.725 million viewers overall and 992,000 in the key demo. NBC’s demo victory over ABC was its first since Llamas replaced Lester Holt last fall as the lead of the nightly news broadcast.
It remains to be seen if Dokoupil and Weiss can turn around the low ratings for the show with what many observers – both inside and outside the network – have denounced as a “MAGA-friendly” pivot to directly appeal to the president and his supporters.
Weiss, the founder of the “anti-woke” digital outlet The Free Press, was installed as CBS News’ top editor in October by Paramount chief David Ellison – who is looking to curry favor with Trump amid his hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. “It’s state TV,” one network staffer told The Independent, with others calling it “sad and pathetic.”
Dokoupil did little to silence those critics when he scored an exclusive interview with the president during a tour of a Ford plant in Detroit.
“So CBS gave Trump essentially 3/4 of the Evening News tonight, airing an interview that would be right at home on Fox News (dayside, not primetime.) Not a single question about Justice Dept. resignations or Epstein Files. Not a single Trump lie corrected,” Vulture editor Joe Adalian noted after the broadcast.
That interview also included Trump repeatedly telling Dokoupil that he wouldn’t have his job as nightly anchor if Kamala Harris became president, prompting the host to eventually retort, “I do think I’d have this job even if the other guys won.”
Trump, meanwhile, fired back: “Yeah, but at a lesser salary.”
One network staffer told The Independent that it was a “crap interview” and the only thing it will be remembered for is that Dokoupil “couldn’t just ignore Trump’s broadside” about the president taking credit for his hiring.
