MAGA-coded CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has been humiliated even on vacation after it emerged that his summer stand-in had pulled off the show’s best ratings in months.
The embattled Dokoupil, 45, has anchored the flagship news program since January, a stretch that has coincided with mounting scrutiny of the broadcast under CBS News boss Bari Weiss, the anti-woke former blogger who has done her best to make the network more Trump-friendly.
Weiss has heavily vetted output and axed a half-dozen senior producers and correspondents at the network’s flagship show, 60 Minutes, in what insiders refer to as “Black Thursday.” She has also installed inexperienced lackeys in crucial roles. For example, 49-year-old TV news virgin Nick Bilton is now the executive editor of the storied newsmagazine.
Weiss’s tenure, and Dokoupil’s, have been calamitous, so when ratings for the prior week were finalized earlier this week, CBS News recorded a rare win. Dokoupil’s show cleanly surpassed 4 million viewers for the first time since March—but with Matt Gutman at the helm.
Gutman, who joined from ABC News earlier this year, has been filling in while Dokoupil, who is married to MS NOW’s Katy Tur, is out on a two-week vacation.
During Gutman’s first week in the chair in July, he averaged 4.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings data obtained by Status, the best-rated week for the program in 17 weeks. Dokoupil, by contrast, has not topped 4 million viewers since the week of March 30, when he averaged 4.2 million.
The slump comes amid a string of high-profile mishaps for Dokoupil. The biggest arrived on the Fourth of July, when CBS aired a three-hour primetime special from the National Mall marking America’s 250th anniversary.
Severe weather forced an evacuation of the site where Dokoupil and co-anchor Nischelle Turner were stationed, and according to the New York Post, insiders described the resulting broadcast as “amateur hour” and “disastrous,” claiming the anchors spent nearly an hour waiting in the rain for direction while backup anchors filled airtime from the studio.
By the time Dokoupil and Turner abandoned the site and relocated to CBS’s D.C. studio, nearly two-thirds of the special had already aired. “The broadcast left some of the staffers mortified,” one source told the Post, while another called CBS News a “rudderless ship.” CBS pushed back, insisting its contingency plans worked and viewers had received uninterrupted coverage.
That came days after another on-air blunder, when a report about Sean “Diddy” Combs and speculation over a potential presidential pardon mistakenly aired a photograph of Kanye West instead, an error later scrubbed from digital and streaming versions of the broadcast.
Dokoupil also ran into trouble during CBS’s coverage of President Donald Trump’s May trip to China, when the network failed to secure him a visa, forcing him to anchor from Taiwan instead of Beijing. “It was a mistake,” Dokoupil told the Wall Street Journal in June. “Someone should’ve got a visa.”
That same trip descended into chaos when a cameraman suffered a medical emergency on air, cutting the broadcast to B-roll mid-sentence as Dokoupil asked, “Is he OK?”
ABC News anchor David Muir was also on vacation last week, which likely nudged some viewers toward NBC News and CBS News and gave Gutman a boost. But substitute anchors typically perform worse than the regular anchor, making his numbers stand out regardless. The situation has also raised eyebrows over why Dokoupil, just eight months into the role, would take a two-week break at all.
“Summer is when the second and third place networks try to make progress against the first place anchor who goes on vacation,” a veteran television executive told Status.
“In this case the third place anchor took off for two weeks—a baffling move given his collapsing show—and his substitute outclassed him in the ratings.”
The executive called it “another dagger in Tony’s neck” and a “missed opportunity” for Dokoupil to have lured viewers away from Muir himself. Inside CBS News, Status reported, Gutman’s win has generated buzz in the newsroom, with staffers describing the 48-year-old as likable and easy to work with.
The network has been approached for comment.
