Tony Dokoupil’s rough go in the CBS Evening News anchor chair has gotten even rougher after the latest ratings showed his broadcast once again trailing behind its network rivals.
According to Nielsen data reported by AdWeek, CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil averaged 3.765 million total viewers and 501,000 viewers in the key Adults 25-54 demographic during the week of June 29. The program fell below the four-million-viewer threshold, declining 6 percent in total viewers and 13 percent in the demo compared with the previous week.
While CBS struggled, ABC continued to dominate the evening news race. World News Tonight with David Muir averaged 8.128 million viewers and 964,000 viewers in the key demographic, making it the only network evening newscast to gain in both categories compared with the previous week.
NBC’s Nightly News, hosted by Tom Llamas, finished second with 6.16 million viewers.
The ratings slump comes as Dokoupil, 45, faces growing scrutiny over a series of high-profile mishaps at CBS News, which has been rocked by controversy since Bari Weiss took over as editor-in-chief.
Weiss, the anti-woke founder of The Free Press, has drawn criticism from current and former CBS staffers who say the network has embraced a Trump-friendly approach to coverage under her leadership.
The biggest embarrassment for Dokoupil arrived on the Fourth of July, when CBS aired a three-hour primetime special from Washington, D.C., celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.
Severe weather forced an evacuation of the National Mall, where Dokoupil and co-host Nischelle Turner had been stationed. According to The New York Post, insiders described the resulting broadcast as “amateur hour” and “disastrous,” claiming the anchors spent nearly an hour waiting in the rain for direction from network leadership while backup anchors filled airtime from a studio.
By the time Dokoupil and Turner abandoned plans to return to the Mall and relocated to CBS’s Washington studio, nearly two-thirds of the special had already aired.
“The broadcast left some of the staffers mortified,” one source told the Post, while another described CBS News as a “rudderless ship.”
CBS pushed back on the criticism, insisting that contingency plans worked as intended and that viewers received uninterrupted coverage despite the weather disruptions.
The holiday special came just days after another on-air blunder. During a report about Sean “Diddy” Combs and speculation surrounding a potential presidential pardon, CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil mistakenly aired a photograph of Kanye West instead. The error was later removed from digital and streaming versions of the broadcast.
Dokoupil also faced scrutiny during CBS’s coverage of President Donald Trump’s May trip to China. While competing network anchors reported from Beijing, CBS failed to secure a visa for Dokoupil, forcing him to anchor coverage from Taiwan.
“It was a mistake,” Dokoupil told The Wall Street Journal last month. “Someone should’ve got a visa.”
