Ratings Rise for Tony Dokoupil’s ‘CBS Evening News’ Amid More Lefty Meltdowns

In an exclusive to the New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad ahead of public release by CBS News PR, Nielsen ratings for Monday’s debut of the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil came in and, try as the liberal haters tried to spin it, they were solid with Dokoupil notching 4.4 million total viewers, up a half million people than average.

“That’s half-a-million more sets of eyeballs on average than what the broadcast had been getting under previous co-anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who helmed the ratings-challenged show for roughly one year,” Steigrad wrote.

Along with the 4.4 million total viewers coming out to a nine-percent increase, she added that Dokoupil fetched “596,000 viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25 to 54-year old demographic,” which marked a 20 percent increase “versus the season’s average to date.”

Dokoupil’s second day of ratings were also strong as the newscast — which he anchored from the Venezuelan-heavy Doral, Florida — included exclusives with Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Macado and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem:

Substantively, day three was a reminder that, as we’ve predicted here, Dokoupil was and is not a MAGA mouthpiece by any stretch.

Here he was grilling Trump border czar Tom Homan about the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers over the last year and why the administration has continued to seek the deportation of Venezuelans despite the country remaining under authoritarian rule:

And, ahead of Thursday’s show, the CBS Evening News X account had posted clips of Dokoupil giving open range for anti-ICE protesters to speak their mind (just as he has done for Trump supporters during man-on-the-streets for CBS Mornings):

Despite all this, the liberal media have still worked to undermine Dokoupil and demonstrate their bias.

Over at The Wrap, a Thursday article reveled in the reported axing of a producer on Evening News as the latest negative headline symbolizing the show’s “rocky rollout.”

Reporters Corbin Bolies and Alyssa Ray wrote that “Javier Guzman, a senior broadcast producer for ‘CBS Evening News,’ was dismissed from his position following Wednesday’s broadcast” with “one source attribut[ing] the exit to disagreements with executive producer Kim Harvey rather than the show’s launch.”

Nonetheless, they said the dismissal of an employee who had been there “for almost eight years” — and thus dealt with at least five different anchors — “left multiple staffers in CBS’s midtown Manhattan headquarters in New York ‘in tears’ over Guzman’s ouster...and demanded answers as to why he was fired.”

They then threw in with the predictable smears of Dokoupil by their fellow liberal media hall monitors (click “expand”):

This high-level exit comes after widespread criticism of Dokoupil’s takeover of the “CBS Evening News” and approach to covering the Trump administration. During his first few days as anchor, the journalist notably took a both-sides framing while commenting on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, as opposed to condemning the violence and placing the blame on pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol.

Dokoupil also raised eyebrows with his light-hearted coverage of the memes about Secretary of State Marco Rubio taking on too many jobs, later praising the politician as “the ultimate Florida man.”

Of course, Dokoupil isn’t the only one facing scrutiny over at CBS. The October appointment of Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief sparked ample backlash, due to her lack of experience running a traditional newsroom and coming from running the right-leaning Free Press.

The tools at the Daily Beast also made sure to join this Mean Girls party in attacking the “MAGA Coded CBS Anchor” as, along with a piece giddily celebrating him “fall[ing] apart in Evening News debut,” they also called the producer’s firing another chapter in the “rocky debut” and condemned Dokoupil for crying in a CBS Miami interview about taking the top job.

Question: How old are these people?

In a piece Thursday afternoon, they even lamented on Thursday that his wife — MS NOW host Katy Tur — was “standing by” her “MAGA-Coded husband.”

Puck’s Dylan Byers also joined the pile-on with a Wednesday night dispatched headlined, “The Tony Accords; Tony Dokoupil’s disastrous debut as anchor of CBS Evening News highlights the uncomfortable truth about Bari Weiss’s tenure: While her politics take center stage, it’s her inexperience that’s her real liability.”

Byers led with the on-air snafu and mocked the comments seconds prior about Venezuela as “some presumably brilliant geopolitical commentary.”

He conceded “[s]hit happens, as Shakespeare said” and even took a brief jab at his fellow media reporters by describing their reactions “heavy, if slightly hyperbolic, fire” at Dokoupil, even if it came “against the backdrop of all the recent Bari Weiss player-hating—her controversial preemption of a 60 Minutes segment, her Erika Kirk misfire, her naive Bret and Anderson poaching efforts, etcetera.”

But he went back to suggesting the mockery was justified because Dokoupil “brought some of it on himself” with his January 1 commentary (which he dubbed “Bari’s warmed-over anti-media schtick”) about trust in the press that he claimed was an attack on Tur.

“Tony has also developed a newfound sycophancy for the Trump administration—saluting Marco Rubio, both-sidesing January 6—effortlessly showcasing the malleability of people who get paid to read teleprompters,” he derisively added, claiming he had heard Dokoupil “was still writing his geopolitical commentary minutes before he went live” and that was what caused the “fodder for eager critics.”

As the piece went on, however, Byers turned down the attacks and gave credence to the “thesis” by Paramount Skydance boss David Ellison that broadcast news has existed with “a center-left ideological locus” and, in CBS’s case, they’ve been the “perennial third-place, money-losing network” behind ABC and CBS, so “pivoting to a wide-open center-right lane with a digital media entrepreneur makes quite a bit of sense, particularly in America circa 2026.”

He also dialed up some juicy-but-predictable details about how many entrenched leftists at CBS loathe here and Weiss has subsequently been irked by the leaks (click “expand”):

Even if Bari has Ellison’s support, she’s vastly outnumbered by her employees, none of whom were consulted on this vision shift. Many staffers were discouraged by her decision to engage in a public spat with George Clooney...And they have been especially turned off by Bari’s wife, Nellie Bowles, using The Free Press to mock the “public meltdown” over the aforementioned 60 Minutes scandal.

(....)

Bari...privately chafes at the laziness and mediocrity of some staffers and has told multiple people that she’ll fire anyone who isn’t willing to work hard and get on board with her leadership, per sources who heard her say it directly...Staffers also say she has at times been visibly frustrated by how hard it is for her bookers to land big-name guests—a task, as you’ll recall, that she has often taken up herself by pulling out her phone in meetings and texting sources directly. Finally, for a journalist who claims to champion a free press...she seems remarkably miffed by the leaks coming out of her own shop[.]