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CBS appoints Tony Dokoupil as anchor of its flagship ‘CBS Evening News’ broadcast

CBS News appointed Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” on Wednesday, charging him with taking on ABC’s dominant David Muir on one of the flagship shows for broadcast television.

Dokoupil, who has been part of the “CBS Mornings” team since 2019, will start his new job on Jan. 5. He replaces the anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who both announced they were leaving the network in recent months.

Dokoupil is the first major hire for Bari Weiss, the Free Press founder who was appointed CBS News editor-in-chief this fall after the network’s corporate takeover by Paramount.

“We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media,” Weiss said. “Tony Dokoupil is the person to win it back. That’s because he believes in old school journalistic values — asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account.”

He’s got a challenge. The “CBS Evening News” has long ranked third among the broadcast network evening news shows, and this year has just over half the audience of ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

Dokoupil, 44, who is married to MS NOW’s Katy Tur, has been with CBS News since 2016. He worked at MSNBC prior to that, and wrote for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He hosts a weekly streaming show, “The Uplift,” about positive news stories and wrote the memoir, “The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son and the Golden Age of Marijuana,” about his father’s life as a drug smuggler.

CBS News reprimanded Dokoupil following a contentious interview about Israel and the Palestinians with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on Sept. 30, 2024. Speaking to Coates about an essay he wrote, Dokoupil said it “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and asked Coates what offended him about the existence of a Jewish state.

Then-CBS News chief Wendy McMahon said at the time that “our job is to serve our audience without bias or perceived bias.” A phone call of McMahon discussing the issue with CBS staff members was leaked to the Free Press — edited by Weiss.

Promising viewers a commitment to “the plain truth”

In a statement, Dokoupil said Wednesday that “after 20 years of journalism, traveling through all 50 states and talking with people in hundreds of far-flung American places, I realize why a country this big needs a show this ambitious.” He promised viewers “a commitment to trust and the plain truth.”

During the search for a new “CBS Evening News” anchor, Weiss reached out to people outside of the network, including Bret Baier at Fox News Channel and Anderson Cooper, who reports for CBS’ “60 Minutes” along with his nightly anchor job at CNN.

Baier is a competitor, and an uncomfortably close one at that: his Fox evening newscast averages 3 million viewers a night, compared to the 4.04 million at the “CBS Evening News,” and has beaten CBS head to head 11 times this year, according to the Nielsen company.

Once king of the hill in Walter Cronkite’s era, the “CBS Evening News” fell to third place in nightly news viewership during Dan Rather’s long tenure. That status hasn’t changed through the lengthening list of his successors: Katie Couric, Jeff Glor, Scott Pelley, Norah O’Donnell and the team of Dickerson and DuBois.

This year, Muir’s ABC newscast has averaged 7.83 million viewers a night, with the “NBC Nightly News” anchored by Tom Llamas has 6.19 million, Nielsen said.

Worse for CBS, the gap has widened. The ABC newscast is down 2% in viewers over 2024 and NBC is down 3%, while the “CBS Evening News” is down 16 percent.

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

Grandfather recovering from surgery after bison attack at Yellowstone sent him flying

By WTOP Staff
(CNN) — What started as a yearly trip for a grandfather and his grandson turned into a visit to a Montana hospital after a bison attack at Yellowstone National Park.Carl McDaniel, 65, was hospitalized with a broken femur after a bison charged and tossed him into the air Friday evening at the park’s Bridge Bay Campground, according to McDaniel and the National Park Service.He was visiting the park with his 13-year-old grandson when they decided to take a walk after dinner.Along the way, they encountered a large bison that appeared to be rolling around in the dust and was not bothering anyone, McDaniel told CNN.“We were about a hundred yards away,” McDaniel said. “He was not aggressive; he was not having problems and we took some pictures and decided to walk on.”McDaniel and his grandson snapped a quick photo and continued with their walk, video of the encounter shows. At the same time, a truck drove by, and the driver laid on his horn in what appeared to be an attempt to get the bison to move, McDaniel said. There is no audio on the video.The bison then appeared to become agitated and began running toward the pair.“There was little time to decide what to do. At that point, he was within 100 yards; he could be to us in seconds, so I told my grandson to run in one direction and I went the other to try and draw him away,” McDaniel said.The animal then pushed McDaniel with the top of its head, sending him flying into the air before he hit the ground, the grandfather said.“When I was on the ground immobile, unable to move, he was right on top of me. He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life, and he did not do so,” McDaniel said.After McDaniel hit the ground, photographer Mike MacLeod, who captured the encounter on video, had to step in, he told Cowboy State Daily.“I was really afraid he was going to gore the guy on the ground, so I stopped videotaping and ran at the bison, yelled loud, and was trying to be as big and intimidating as possible,” MacLeod said.After the bison took off, people rushed over to McDaniel, who was in a lot of pain, MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily. Yellowstone EMS arrived soon after, he said.“Park emergency medical personnel responded and transported him to a nearby hospital,” the National Park Service said in confirming the incident in a statement to CNN.This is the second bison attack at Yellowstone this year. A 12-year-old was injured near Mud Volcano on June 26, according to the agency.After Friday’s attack, “all the people that were there were amazing; they were all positive, they were trying to help as best they could,” McDaniel said. A nurse started tending to his leg, while another bystander held his head.He was then transferred to a hospital in Bozeman, a two-hour journey during which he was in intense pain. He said he was grateful for the paramedic who helped him along the way.McDaniel broke his femur, the body’s strongest bone, in four places near his hip and suffered several bruises. He had surgery Sunday and could stand by Monday.“I will be doing physical therapy for the next few days to get to walk, but it was not as catastrophic as it could have been,” McDaniel said.The National Park Service advises visitors to stay at least 25 yards away from bison at all times and to never approach the animals. “If the bison follows you, spray bear spray as you are moving away, and seek cover behind nearby trees or cars,” the agency said.Correction: An earlier version of this story understated how far visitors should stay away from bison. The National Park Service advises visitors to stay at least 25 yards from them.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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