January 15, 2026 - 5:30pm
With the media’s attention fixed on CBS, Tony Dokoupil marked his second week in the Evening News chair with a presidential interview from Detroit. Are Dokoupil and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss merely puppets of the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which merged Skydance with Paramount and promptly signaled a push for change? Tuesday’s Trump interview yielded little: the ratings were weak, the questions serviceable. But moderation will satisfy no one, and that is the problem.
Dokoupil’s discussion with Trump was fair enough. The President played media critic throughout the segment, jabbing the anchor repeatedly over certain questions and even invoking Dokoupil’s salary. Trump also called Skydance-Paramount CEO David Ellison an “amazing guy”. When pushed with some obvious points on Iran, the economy, and Renee Good (who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week), Trump didn’t give up much more than usual, and Dokoupil largely stuck to the script.
Variety reported shortly before the interview aired that CBS Evening News in Dokoupil’s first week was down 23% in viewership compared with the same period a year ago. NBC and ABC were down as well, but only by 9%. This shows that CBS has work to do.
Weiss’s tenure started in October with leaks, continued with leaks through the holidays, and entered the new year with even more leaks. The morning of Dokoupil’s big interview, a New York Times feature took readers inside CBS News, painting an unflattering picture of Weiss. Two days earlier, at the Golden Globes, comedian Nikki Glaser used the network’s airwaves to joke about the news division’s shaky credibility.
Hypothetically, if one were to take an aging network with declining trust and transform it for the better, people responsible for driving that network into the ground would respond with anger. They would leak internal discussions to their peers at other outlets. They would accuse their new bosses of demanding coverage be biased in the other direction. Every mistake would be scrutinized with unusual vigor. It’s no surprise that this is exactly what’s transpired since October.
The task of reforming CBS News both in style and substance would be monumental for anyone, let alone a young and high-profile pundit already disliked by many journalists. Weiss, for her part, is celebrating two million subscribers at The Free Press and describing the job as an effort to make CBS “the most trusted news organization in the world”.
Weiss’s big moves have included layoffs, eliminating the “race and culture” unit, plucking Dokoupil from his morning job, making hires from Substack and the Wall Street Journal, changing the outlet’s style guide on transgender language, and hosting Erika Kirk for a town hall.
The Kirk town hall is an instructive example of how all this is going. Because Weiss, who conducted the interview herself, brought up the man who was questioning Kirk’s late husband when he was assassinated, conservatives were infuriated by the broadcast. Progressives found it cringeworthy. Nobody was happy — and the ratings reflected that.
If Ellison’s aim in hiring Weiss and acquiring The Free Press was to move CBS from a monocultural media model to a microcultural one — where opinionated news prevails, and audiences value transparency over neutrality — the network’s early strategy would not look so resolutely backwards. Yet that interpretation makes more sense than CBS attempting to resurrect an ideal of neutrality and monoculture in an age when most news is consumed through highly personalized social media feeds.
Weiss, according to the Times, described the “goal” of Dokoupil’s recent broadcasts on the road as “not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*”. By that standard, Tuesday’s Trump interview failed. It looked and sounded a lot like what CBS would have done before the Weiss era.
That’s the problem: monoculture is dead, so the audience for contrived centrism on nightly TV doesn’t exist in American living rooms, and doesn’t ultimately reflect much change in newsrooms after wokeness is rightfully purged. If Weiss transformed CBS into an elevated version of The Free Press for a post-woke era, with coverage offered more often by self-aware journalists with transparent biases and a clearer digital-first strategy, the takeover could succeed. If Weiss is looking to make those changes, it’s not yet obvious.
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