Review: New ‘CBS Evening News’ Shows Tony Dokoupil Will Do the News (Imagine That)

Following an unscheduled, two-day soft launch thanks to the U.S. military action in Venezuela to capture dictator Nicolas Maduro, Monday marked the first official episode of the new CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil that, aside from a teleprompter snafu, came off as refreshingly down-the-middle and normal.

One might suggest normal might convey a feeling of boredom or staleness. But in this deeply partisan world and a legacy, elite media that have long lost the trust of the wider public, it’s what we need.

Looking back at our reviews of the first CBS Evening News episodes of predecessors Norah O’Donnell and the team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, it was a marked and welcome change that, as we had hoped, was more in line with the days of Jeff Glor.

Dokoupil was named anchor back on December 10, so there was little time to instigate a quick turnaround with graphics and theme music. As such, the font was tweaked and CBS threwback to theme music from 40 years ago:

 

Dokoupil led with Maduro and his wife making their first appearance in a U.S. courtroom (click “expand”):

Well, good evening. I`m Tony Dokoupil. And we begin here in New York City, where the now-deposed president and former first lady of Venezuela appeared today in federal court just two days after U.S. commandos snatched them from a compound in Caracas. The historic pictures coming in all day, Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores under heavy guard clad in those blue jail shirts. And then, once inside the court, they pleaded not guilty to all the charges against them. Maduro at one point tried to rise and address the court before the judge cut him off, so let’s go straight to Matt Gutman, our chief correspondent, our new chief correspondent, by the way. Welcome. He was there for all of it, and he joins us now from the federal detention center in Brooklyn, where Maduro and his wife are being held at this hour.

Chief correspondent Matt Gutman — who spent five days in a Maduro regime black site jail in 2016 while reporting for ABC — kept it straight with a play-by-play of the proceedings.

Senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe then had the political fallout, acknowledging “there are still few answers about what’s next” and was followed by national security correspondent Charlie D’Agata’s new tic-toc on Saturday’s operation (although he lazily framed the 30+ Cubans killed as “citizens who served on Maduro’s security team”).

After correspondent Lilia Luciano’s dispatch from the Colombia/Venezuela border, correspondent Christian Benavides giving voice to the “euphoria..and cautious optimism” from Venezuelan expats, and business analyst Jill Schlesinger on oil prices, Dokoupil offered his only commentary:

 

Next came the teleprompter snafu, but Dokoupil handled it well, eventually getting to a news brief on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest moves against Democrat Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) and a full story about Democrat Governor Tim Walz (MN) dropping his reelection bid over the state’s Somali fraud scandal:

 

Dokoupil wrapped with segments on the new Health and Human Services (HHS) recommendations on scheduling childhood vaccinations — which didn’t including the hurling of invective at the administration — and then an Oregon town’s attempt to avoid higher taxes by selling a nudist calendar.

Longtime conservative columnist Philip Tezian also watched the debut episode and gave a succinct review:

Will we be singing the praises of the Dokoupil-led Evening News every night? Of course not. In fact, it’s a safe bet NewsBusters will be calling them out plenty for missing this story or that story. We made that clear when he was hired, although his recent track record has been hopeful.

For example, Dokoupil buried in a commercial break chyron the arrest of man for allegedly attacking Vice President JD Vance’s Cincinnati, Ohio-area home.

But given the knives already out for Dokoupil and Weiss from many of the so-called media reporters, nuance does not appear to exist in the ether.

Variety’s chief correspondent Daniel D’Addario was cartoonishly inconsolable in his review, headlined by claiming the debut was “an inauspicious sign of where CBS News is headed.”

D’Addario huffed “Dokoupil betrayed a Weissian willingness to bulldoze past that which might seem too untidy for whatever hypothetical viewer he and his editor have in mind.”

Complaining about Dokoupil’s aside about China and Russia that he called “blandly stated...without citing any source or consulting any guest,” D’Addario claimed “telling the whole story” was “not...Dokoupil’s strong suit, or his interest.”

He carried this thought over to the vaccines block and hurling a grievance about Dokoupil having dared to state there were “parents out there who are celebrating” (i.e. those dirty MAHA moms) and will “have some options for themselves.”

All told, D’Addario stated definitively that “Dokoupil lacks the charisma and aptitude to turn the ‘Evening News’ into whatever it is [Weiss] may want” and giddily said “thankfully...viewers have some options for” a newscast and “few...will choose this reboot.”

“The hypothetical viewer who wishes their news were pitched at a more conservative tenor is super-served by Fox News and Newsmax...and, in terms of comfort in the chair and ability to convey thought, Dokoupil has a way to go and will likely move in the wrong direction,” he added.

This Oliver Darcy wannabe concluded by roping in Weiss’s yanking of a horribly biased 60 Minutes story about a Salvadoran jail as “a tragedy” and “shattering” the show’s “prestige” and then another cheap, personal shot at Dokoupil: “Perhaps sequestering Dokoupil there might contain the damage that might be done by an anchor whose ambitious ability to see which way the wind blows has so far outstripped his broadcasting talent.”

Between D’Addario, Darcy and the Status team, Guardian’s Jeremy Barr, Independent’s Justin Bargona, and the clowns at Zeteo, the knives are out for Dokoupil, largely for having contrary views like this: