Less well known are some of the incidents involving the Evening News that inspired internal discomfort.
Weiss and top producers had drawn up plan to jet Dokoupil around the country to underscore his desire to talk to Americans outside elite circles in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
Yet since Dokoupil’s debut in early January, CBS has taken an Evening News segment off the air called “Eye On America,” on since 2024, that had been doing just that.
On the first night, executives pulled Dokoupil back to New York City to cover the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The second night was Jan. 6 and Dokoupil was in Miami. Major news organizations including NPR and the New York Times offered new projects on the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol about what had been learned in the intervening five years.
Dokoupil offered this scant reference: “President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of ‘whitewashing’ it.” The he-said, he-said formulation lasted about 15 seconds.
That prompted denunciations from outside critics. Sarah Longwell, the founder and publisher of the center-right, anti-Trump publication the Bulwark, wrote on X: “Trump is getting exactly what his rich buddy paid for.”
David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount was financed by his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The elder Ellison is a Trump adviser who encouraged his efforts to contest the 2020 race.
CBS Justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane took great exception to Dokoupil’s Jan. 6 broadcast, according to two people inside the network who spoke on condition they not be named.
The reporter has spent the past five years covering the attack on the U.S. Congress, drawing upon evidence presented in court to document the effort to deny the formal certification of President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 race.
He did not appear on the air on CBS News this Jan. 6. Instead, as he posted on the social media platform X, MacFarlane appeared on the BBC. It lasted nearly four-and-a-half-minutes.
“Here’s my deep dive on the 5-year mark of Jan 6,” MacFarlane wrote. “The ongoing impact on victims, the lies… and the continued malignant corrosion of democracy[.] As aired on…. The BBC.”
At the tail of that night’s broadcast from Miami, Dokoupil hailed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a prominent Floridian in a flippant segment at the end. The anchor noted his key role in the administration – including on Venezuela – and shared AI-generated social media memes envisioning Rubio in a variety of roles, including as a hunter, the Michelin Man, and the leader of Greenland.
“Marco Rubio, we salute you,” Dokoupil deadpanned. The light-hearted approach to the minute-long segment so close to the Venezuelan military action delighted the Trump White House and stirred backlash from journalists.
Weiss has personally gotten involved to secure major interviews in her drive for the network to make and break news.
Dokoupil landed several big-name interviews including those of Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and Trump. The Independent reported Hegseth said he only did the interview because Weiss asked. The New York Times posted audio showing that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt threatened to sue CBS at the end of the interview with Trump if it was not run in full, unedited. Dokoupil said it would.
In a statement, CBS News said the network had already made “the independent decision to air it unedited and in its entirety.”
Several current and former CBS journalists pointed to another instance that appeared to pull a punch that could land hard on the Trump administration. Correspondent Nicole Sganga broke down video footage of the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer. A retired ICE agent who watched the footage frame by frame with CBS said the officer appeared to act improperly.
The segment streamed on the YouTube page of CBS Evening News. But it did not air on the flagship news program.
“There are always growing pains when you start something new,” says former CBS News President Andrew Heyward, citing the reinvention of CBS Evening News with Dokoupil as anchor. “Those growing pains have been exacerbated by today’s polarized political atmosphere and execution errors.”
“Now comes the hard slog of, day after day, drawing on CBS News’s journalistic capacities to do original reporting that delivers real value to the existing audience and attracts new people without chasing away the people who like what they say,” Heyward says.
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