On Monday night of Tony Dokoupil’s first week anchoring the CBS Evening News, Bari Weiss walked into the newsroom and asked to see the script. Weiss, the new boss at CBS News, then added a few lines to a January 5 segment on the U.S. military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro.
The added text was placed in the teleprompter twice, and Dokoupil stumbled over his words for several seconds on air in front of millions of viewers. He then told viewers, “First day, big problems here.”
The moment landed hard inside CBS because it collided with Dokoupil’s public pitch for what he said would be a different kind of broadcast. Before the Evening News launched, he recorded a video manifesto attacking “legacy media” for relying too heavily on “academics or elites.” In a social media comment, he also said his show would be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era.”
A former CBS producer said Weiss’s edits were meant to frame President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia and Iran. A former CBS News anchor called the episode “What a disaster,” while a former CBS executive who worked closely with Dokoupil said, “He completely lost the room.”
The friction points around the newscast point to a broader fight over direction at CBS News under the new regime. Weiss was brought in to run the network as part of a broader effort to remake it under Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, whose name has been tied to the Skydance merger with Paramount. That overhaul has drawn criticism inside CBS, especially over Dokoupil’s public mission statement and the tone of the new leadership.
CBS News declined to make Dokoupil available for an interview, but said: “Tony Dokoupil is an exceptional talent and experienced journalist who continues to build a program designed to reach audiences wherever they consume the news.” The question now is not whether the rollout got off to a rough start. It did. The real test is whether CBS can turn a shaky debut, and the clash behind it, into a credible newscast before viewers decide the experiment for them.
