CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil failed to get his Chinese visa in time to cover President Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping.
Dokoupil will instead broadcast from Taipei, while his competitors, NBC News’s Tom Llamas and ABC News’s David Muir, will be anchoring from Beijing, where the action is really happening. The approximate distance from Taipei to Beijing is about 1,070 miles—a similar distance to that of New York to Tampa, Florida.
CBS News was prepared for Dokoupil to provide its viewers with similar coverage, but was forced to change plans and position Dokoupil instead in Taiwan at the last minute, Semafor reported. Two CBS correspondents are still traveling with Trump in China.
In their promotional social media post for the broadcast, CBS News vaguely said Dokoupil is ready to anchor “CBS Evening News LIVE from the region.”
Semafor reported that it remains unclear whether Dokoupil’s visa issues were due to a late application or another problem. CBS News did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
The visa setback comes as CBS Evening News ratings have been in a free fall since Dokoupil took over the storied program at the start of this year.
Ratings for the week of May 4 show that Dokoupil brought in an average of just 3.7 million total viewers and only 473,000 average viewers in the key demo of 25-54 year olds, which TV advertisers closely watch.
The ratings are especially poor when compared to those of ABC World News Tonight, which averaged 8.2 million total viewers and 976,000 in the key demo, and NBC Nightly News, which saw an average of 6.1 million total viewers and 903,000 in the key demo.
CBS News has been swarmed with controversy after Bari Weiss, who had no professional experience in TV news before assuming her new role, took over the network last year in an effort to make it more Trump-friendly.
In addition to his visa problems, Dokoupil’s time so far in the anchor seat has also been nothing short of tumultuous.
His debut broadcast in January was filled with gaffes and several awkward moments as he stumbled over the teleprompter repeatedly.
It was later reported by Vanity Fair that his jumbled words were the result of Weiss personally stepping in to rewrite some of the script for the teleprompter just before Dokoupil went on air, in what is seen as a highly unusual move for a TV executive at her level.
Dokoupil acknowledged the awkwardness on-air, telling viewers: “First day, big problems here.”
“What a disaster,” one former CBS News anchor told Vanity Fair. “Honestly, I would’ve f---ing killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”
Staff at the network have also reportedly been displeased by Dokoupil’s time anchoring the storied news program, especially after he made comments trashing the legacy media, of which he and his wife, MS Now’s Katy Tur, have both been a part of for over a decade. Just before taking over Evening News, Dokoupil accused the “legacy media” of having “missed the story” by putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
“I just don’t even understand how you could say something like that,” said one former CBS executive who worked closely with Dokoupil. “He completely lost the room.”
