One of the top priorities in Bari Weiss’ fledgling reign atop CBS News is to reshape the network’s evening news broadcast, which was once anchored by the legendary Walter Cronkite but has lately been mired in third place amid a revolving door of hosts and a recent format change.
Weiss, the founder of the anti-woke digital outlet The Free Press who was installed as the network’s editor-in-chief earlier this month, has been intently focused on bringing in a high-profile external candidate to help reverse CBS Evening News’ fortunes and boost its increasingly struggling ratings.
While it has already been reported that Weiss is eyeing Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier and CNN star Anderson Cooper for the role, despite both making eight-digit salaries and being locked into contracts with rival networks, The Guardian revealed Friday that another name has entered the fray: Fox News anchor Dana Perino.
Perino, a former George W. Bush spokesperson, has been with the conservative cable giant since 2009 and currently serves as both a co-anchor of the midday news broadcast America’s Newsroom and a panelist on the top-rated roundtable program The Five.
The Independent has reached out to CBS News and Fox News for comment.
Much like Baier, who shot down the CBS News rumors this week by making it clear he’s signed with Fox News through 2028, Perino has a long-term contract with the right-wing network. In fact, as The Guardian pointed out, she’s locked into her Fox News deal until the 2030s.
While it seems highly unlikely that Perino would be able to jump to CBS due to her contract – she would need to negotiate a buyout with Fox owners Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch – one this is abundantly clear: she is a self-described “huge fan” of Weiss, and vice versa.
During an appearance on Weiss’ podcast this past spring, Perino declared that The Free Press is “one of the best things that has kept me more informed and smarter, and also super entertained.” Weiss, in return, heaped praise on the Fox News star.
“The private Dana is even more gracious and shining than the public one,” the former New York Times columnist declared. “You are a person who models, frankly, just classy behavior, the kind of class that I think a lot of people have forgotten.”
When asked about Weiss considering Perino to lead CBS Evening News, one senior CBS News staffer responded to The Independent with a face-palm emoji.
Another name that has been floated around the network as a possible candidate for the CBS Evening News, first reported by The Guardian and confirmed by The Independent with multiple sources, is former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith.
Smith, who suddenly quit Fox in 2019 amid an on-air feud with then-host Tucker Carlson, was last seen in the anchor chair during his ill-fated run hosting a weeknight newscast on CNBC, which ended in 2022 after the network ditched the experiment following low ratings. The veteran anchor, who has kept a low profile since leaving the airwaves, doesn’t appear to be in serious contention for the CBS News gig, sources added.
Earlier this week, amid rumors that Weiss and network president Tom Cibrowski were making sweeping changes to the show, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson announced that he was leaving both the program and the network at the end of the year. Maurice DuBois, his fellow host on the telecast, is not expected to remain with the show, as it is expected to return to a single-anchor format.
While Weiss is looking to generate buzz for the flagship evening broadcast by bringing in a splashy outside hire, there are also a number of internal candidates in the running for the anchor’s seat.
Norah O’Donnell, who hosted CBS Evening News for five years before being replaced by Dickerson and Dubois, could return to the position and, according to CBS sources, has been aggressively lobbying Weiss for another chance.
CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil, whom Weiss and The Free Press vehemently defended after he was reprimanded by CBS News management over his contentious interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates last year, is seen as the favorite internally. According to several network insiders, though, he’s told his CBS Mornings colleagues he is not interested.
Regardless of who steps in as the next anchor of CBS Evening News, which is currently only drawing half the viewership of rival ABC News’ nightly newscast, the show will once again undergo a complete remodel less than a year after its latest transformation.
Besides replacing O’Donnell with Dickerson and DuBois as a two-man anchor team, the network also moved the show from Washington, D.C., to New York City and attempted to fashion it after the top-rated Sunday newsmagazine 60 Minutes. This included putting it under the supervision of then-60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, who would leave the network months later amid growing tensions over Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the network, which Paramount would settle weeks before merging with David Ellison’s Skydance Media.
Meanwhile, the drama surrounding CBS Evening News is just the tip of the iceberg for the network, which has been riddled with turmoil and plummeting staff morale amid steep layoffs, programming cuts, rumblings of other radical changes, concerns about Ellison shifting the network to the right to pander to Trump and the recent arrival of Weiss, who has no broadcast journalism experience.
