Others see all the angst around Weiss as a little hysterical. One reporter who’s fond of her calls it “Bari derangement syndrome.” To her defenders inside CBS, she’s a well-meaning if naive liberal whose errors are borne more out of inexperience than malice. She may have been out of place amid the progressive paroxysm that engulfed The New York Times in 2020, but she’s hardly MAGA. The CBS journalist tells me that Weiss often praises teams for tough coverage of the Trump administration, and has described certain Trump policies as “insane.”
There might be a little “Tony derangement syndrome” at play as well. The clips that have gone painfully viral belie the reality that the Evening News, on any given night, is a fairly anodyne broadcast. A recent episode mixed straightforward reports on airport delays and the Iran war with some elder-millennial cringe. During a segment on the death of Chuck Norris, Dokoupil reported the late action star inspired “some of the funniest memes on social media,” including: “When Chuck Norris slices onions, the onions cry.”
Even as Weiss—whom the former executive described as “booker in chief” at the network—has managed to land major interviews for the Evening News, Dokoupil has continued to face criticism for his kid-glove questioning of the powerful. When Dokoupil conducted a gentle interview with Netanyahu last October, producers were surprised by his deferential attitude to the Israeli prime minister when the cameras weren’t live. At one point, according to a former staffer who watched the footage, Dokoupil started “bragging” to Netanyahu about his relationship with Weiss. Netanyahu didn’t seem to care. “Bibi didn’t give a shit about Bari Weiss,” a CBS source says. “He was just like, ‘Okay, whatever.’”
There was one recent moment of competitive success for the show. After the United States joined Israel in striking Iran, CBS News moved quickly to get Dokoupil to the region to cover the war on the ground. He caught one of the last commercial flights from New York to Amman, Jordan, landing just hours before the airspace shut down. According to CBS, Dokoupil was the only network anchor to report live from the region as he delivered a nightly narrative of the war.
Even then, his internal detractors remain. “He was very clearly reporting this through the lens of Israel,” says the correspondent, describing a drastic shift from the kind of journalism the Evening News used to deliver. “We are just parroting Israeli talking points and being deeply incurious about anything else outside the echo chamber Bari and Tony Dokoupil happen to live in.”
The new anchor returned to New York to a harsh reality. The week after his trip, the Evening News reportedly averaged just 3.8 million viewers, a considerable drop from his first week in the anchor chair and below a dreaded threshold that spelled the end of his predecessors’ careers. The ratings last month were similarly grim: According to Nielsen, the show saw its lowest-rated March this century. “There’s a lot of pressure on him,” says the former CBS executive. “Nobody thought [the ratings] could fall any further. Oh! Look, there we did.”
