Following months of rumors, CBS News’s parent company Paramount Skydance announced Wednesday that CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil will become the new anchor of the CBS Evening News on January 5, signifying editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s biggest gamble yet, the network’s most serious attempt to break out of a lifetime in third place, and the most concrete effort to nudge a legacy newscast back to the center since the days of Jeff Glor from December 2017 to May 2019.
Dokoupil will the top job from longtime CBS News journalist John Dickerson and former CBS New York anchor Maurice DuBois, who lasted less than a year and suffered from criticism over its format, plummeting ratings, and rampantly smug liberal bias.
Weiss acknowledged the non-existent levels of trust in the media, writing in a press release that “[w]e live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media” and Dokoupil will be “the person to win it back...because he believes in old school journalistic values: asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account.”
CBS News President Tom Cibrowski added Dokoupil represents “what everyone wants in an evening-news anchor – authentic, compassionate, unafraid” and “connects instantly, whether he’s talking with world leaders or with families navigating difficult news in their own backyards.”
The on-air announcement came on CBS Mornings’s “Talk of the Table” segment with co-hosts Gayle King and Nate Burleson saying they would be discussing “a guy who everybody’s been whispering about in our hallways, in and out of the building” and thus they had to “clear up some rumors about him.”
Set to M People’s Moving on Up, Burleson made it official: “Tony Dokoupil — or, as Oprah calls him — Tony Baroni — is moving from the table to the desk as the new anchor of CBS Evening News.”
Dokoupil shared his first on-air comments about the new gig, proceeded by heaping praise from Burleson and featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers, who insisted Dokoupil is “the perfect person” to “make us competitive again” and “bring us on the trajectory of winning”:
Here’s ‘CBS Mornings’ announcing that @TonyDokoupil will become the anchor of the @CBSEveningNews in January and will bid farewell to the AM show after seven years at “the best job I’ve ever had in journalism”
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 10, 2025
Tony says EN is “a massively important show” with “a massively… pic.twitter.com/z9f7BgabSH
Dokoupil made clear the change wasn’t out of unhappiness on the AM show: “I want to talk about us because it’s been almost seven years we’ve been doing this together and I am not joking when I say this is the best job I’ve had in journalism, and if things didn’t change around us... I would never change.”
Duthiers backed him up, revealing to viewers “I spoke to you a couple weeks ago, you said if you could retire doing this job with us, that would be your dream.”
Dokoupil paid tribute to his three co-hosts well:
[This new job is] only because of what I learned here. I mean, you are the most authentic, curious, empathetic person on television, Gayle. And I’ve learned so much from you for the last seven years. Nate, you’re the most charming man on TV. I still have a list of 27 activities that we’re going to get to before we pass from this Earth. And Vlad, you’re the renaissance man. You make me smarter about music and humanity everyday. And just the commercial breaks around here, I wish people at home could know, and thank you to the audience as well.
They concluded by asking what Dokoupil’s wife — MS NOW host Katy Tur — thought of this hoopla.
Dokoupil joked “I think she’s been lobbying for this for years” and long wanted to be able to have him join her in taking their children to school.
Dokoupil’s character arc has been certainly interesting. Starting in the Obama era, he was at Newsweek and The Daily Beast then NBCNews.com before shifting to on-camera duties at MSNBC during the 2016 election cycle (which was when he met Tur as a fellow correspondent).
Partway through that election, he shifted over to CBS where he’s been ever since as a correspondent then morning co-host when the newscast was called CBS This Morning.
The NewsBusters archives reveal a lengthy record of bias, most infamously an early 2020 segment in which he used pies to promote socialism (and earned fawning praise from Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren).
But in the last few years, Dokoupil has noticeably tacked toward the center (or at least ensured conservative/non-liberal arguments were accurately articulated, such as here and here). Not-so-coincidentally, one inflection point was his reporting since Hamas’s barbarism on October 7, 2023, which personally affected him because his two older children and ex-wife were living in Israel.
In May 2024, liberal talk radio host Charlamagne tha God accused him of being “on the left” and a Biden voter, leading to Dokoupil dismiss this and shout he was “not on the left.”
It all culminated in a truly red-pill moment as Dokoupil seemed to have been on thin ice because he dared grill far-left author Ta-Nehisi Coates on the September 30, 2024 CBS Mornings about his virulent anti-Israel book.
Following vicious backlash from the pro-Palestinian staffers inside CBS News, Dokoupil survived thanks to then-Paramount boss Shari Redstone and also cultivated the respect of Weiss, who then had launched her site The Free Press.
Be that as it may, readers can expect NewsBusters to provide rigorous oversight of the new CBS Evening News and see if this newscast — which will start with a series of trips across the country to speak with ordinary Americans — will live up the standard Cibrowski, Weiss, and Dokoupil himself have set.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from December 10, click here.
