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“We’re two weeks now into the new year, and it feels like a decade has passed,” CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil intoned to the camera, broadcasting from General Motors’ Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly as he wrapped up Tuesday’s episode with a rundown of the events that have characterized 2026 so far. The United States’ kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and occupation of Venezuela. The Iranian regime’s brutal massacres of thousands of citizen protesters. Minneapolis’ rallies against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents occupying the city after killing Renee Nicole Good. Yet, Dokoupil added, CBS had also “walked into not one, but two exclusive newsmaking conversations” on Tuesday, citing the episode’s preceding segments with GM CEO Mary Barra and, for an interview that was much lengthier and had earned more advance hype, President Donald Trump.
“You may not agree with everything you hear on this broadcast, but we trust you to listen, and we trust you to decide for yourself,” Dokoupil concluded, parroting a favorite line of his before previewing the next stop of his 10-cities-in-10-days editorial excursion: the great city of Chicago, which he would be flying to via a corporate-chartered private jet.
Indeed, if this Detroit stop offered any clue as to how the rest of the tour will go, it’s unlikely to live up to CBS’ initial promise to grant the Evening News’ upstart anchor an opportunity to “meet Americans face to face.” Tuesday night’s episode was dominated by Trump, who stood for his talk with Dokoupil amid the din of the GM factory, taking up nearly half of the half-hour broadcast. The CBS host merely alluded to conversations he’d had with plant staffers and other Detroiters, but none were shown or given due credit on camera. (Not even the autoworker who’d called Trump a “pedophile protector” earlier that day, earning both the president’s middle finger and a company suspension in response.) The “newsmaking” prowess of the chat—which saw Trump boast about “no inflation” and “ending eight wars” sans pushback from the interviewer—manifested primarily in headlines about how much time Trump took up, how uneventful the interview was (in spite of Dokoupil’s pledges to “ask the questions that weren’t being asked before”), and how Trump managed to get in a jab at Dokoupil about the reason he’s even here. (“If [Kamala Harris] got in, you probably wouldn’t have a job right now. Your boss, who’s an amazing guy, might be bust.” Perhaps the most truthful thing Trump said that day!)
Not the most ideal takeaways from a segment where Dokoupil clearly wanted to get one particular confirmation from Trump: whether the U.S. would “get involved if Iran started killing protesters.” Horrific and barbaric as the carnage fostered by the regime has been, Dokoupil’s ethos of supposedly speaking for everyday Americans was belied by this push for “involvement,” considering that an overwhelming majority of U.S. residents do not want their country to take military action against Iran, even in light of the mass slaughter of Iranian citizens. Something even odder: During his closing monologue, Dokoupil vaguely cited “reports” that “as many as 12,000 protesters have been killed by Iran’s government and as Trump weighs intervention.” The primary report in question delivering this shocking figure is … CBS News itself, in an article whose authors admit they have “not been able to independently verify the massive death toll indicated by the source,” and which repeatedly presses a case for U.S. “action” in Iran. (Activists within the country, along with a U.S.-based human rights group, have estimated a death toll of at least 2,500—still a morbid and record-breaking number, but nowhere near the CBS figure.)
In fairness to Tony, this wasn’t the end of dubious reporting affixed with the imprimatur of the broadcaster’s brand. On Wednesday, CBS News’ official social media accounts posted a “BREAKING” update that the ICE agent who’d killed Renee Nicole Good had “suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident”—even though Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated that he’d been “spending time with family” soon after a reported hospital visit.
If one thing has become clear at this point, it’s that you can’t expect any editorial improvement, or solid journalistic value, at Bari Weiss’ CBS News. As my colleague Derreck Johnson pointed out on social media, Weiss had personally seen to it that 60 Minutes should drop its much more elaborate, fact-checked report on the El Salvador gulag where the Trump administration illegally renditioned many immigrants—yet this anonymous, thin story for an ICE agent’s “internal bleeding” gets approved straightaway. (See also: the dropped 60 Minutes segment from veteran Anderson Cooper regarding Trump’s exclusive asylum welcome for Afrikaner “refugees.”) The Free Press, the ostensibly “completely editorial independent” website that’s also owned by Paramount-Skydance, ran a rant from Weiss’ wife defending the decision to drop the El Salvador piece.
The CBS News EIC’s recent memo to her staff, delivered on the eve of Dokoupil’s cross-country tour, laid out that she expects less for her outfit to “deliver the news” than to “*be the news*” through segments with “viral potential.” Setting aside the moral bankruptcy inherent to running a public service whose focus is intended to be all about itself, the only “viral potential” stems from the extent of Weiss’ efforts to give CBS a far more journalistically shaky ethos. At Sunday’s Golden Globes, host Nikki Glaser made a quip about the channel as “BS News” right in front of Paramount-Skydance CEO David Ellison. The legendary David Letterman, who started the Late Show franchise that was very likely canceled last year in order to make the Paramount-Skydance merger happen, eviscerated CBS News’ new leadership for “trampling” and “pissing on” the “integrity of CBS News.” George Clooney called out Weiss for “dismantling CBS News as we speak,” eliciting only a weak clapback from the EIC in response as she invited the actor to visit the studio.
To quote Sky Ferreira, everything is embarrassing. CBS hoped a “Whiskey Fridays” setup for Tony Dokoupil would earn a sponsorship from Jack Daniel’s, only for the liquor’s parent company to flatly deny that it would ever do such a thing. The stumbling and bumbling that characterized Dokoupil’s first day at CBS Evening News reportedly happened in part because Weiss was revising the script up until it was time to broadcast—keeping with her purported affinity for late-night-editing Free Press staffers’ pieces to her liking. (Per a former Wall Street Journal contributor, Weiss also tended to rewrite bits of book reviews when she worked there as an editor, in a manner that gelled with her ideological preferences.) And if you thought Dokoupil’s Tuesday interview with Trump was strange enough, take a look at the way CBS “sanewashed” the president when he spoke with 60 Minutes (post–Paramount merger approval) in November.
Meanwhile, ratings have not been swell for CBS Evening News, Weiss’ first “town hall,” or even for the heralded 60 Minutes. But a Canadian rip of the yanked El Salvador segment racked up some hefty viewership online, as have articles about all the leaks from infuriated CBS News staffers. Meanwhile, Tony Dokoupil’s trust with the American public remains quite low. Congrats to everyone involved!
