Internet firebrand Bari Weiss’s efforts to
“blow up” CBS News have failed to move the ratings needle for “CBS Evening News” as the first quarter of 2026 comes to a close.
The newscast
has remained flat since the beginning of January when former “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil started as “Evening News” anchor.
“Evening News” is still mired in third place behind first-place “ABC World News Tonight” and second-place “NBC Nightly News” -- the same place the CBS
newscast has occupied for years.
For the year-to-date from the week of Monday, January 5 to Friday, January 9, with Dokoupil in the anchor chair, “CBS Evening
News” has been averaging a total audience of 4.269 million.
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The show averaged 4.171 million in the 2024-25
season that ended last September, with Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson co-anchoring.
By contrast, “ABC World News Tonight,” anchored by David
Muir, has averaged 8.712 million viewers year-to-date, and “NBC Nightly News” with Tom Llamas, 6.977 million.
But earlier this month for the week
of March 9-13, total audience for “CBS Evening News” dipped below 4 million to 3.845 million, then came back up the week of March 16-20 -- the most recent week for which weekly averages
are available -- to 4.166 million.
In the demo (25-54), “Evening News” has been averaging 503,727 viewers in Q1, slightly less than half of what
“World News Tonight” and “Nightly News” have had -- at 1.087 million and 1.044 million, respectively.
The point is that with all of
Bari Weiss’s hard-charging talk about blowing things up at CBS News, it is the same old story at the division’s flagship broadcast.
Weiss, 42,
was installed as editor in chief of CBS News last October. Last year as she got settled into her new job, she told CBS News staff that she intended to “blow this up.”
She also predicted dire consequences for CBS News unless its traditional strategy is overhauled.
“Our strategy until now has been [to] cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” she has been widely quoted as saying. “I’m here
to tell you that if we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”
Since October, Weiss’s most visible moves were the decision to replace last year’s
“Evening News” anchor team with Dokoupil as solo anchor, and the decision just last week to shut down CBS Radio News.
The anchor change is a page right
out of the stodgy strategic playbook that she asserts will eventually come to doom the news division.
But the shuttering of the last vestige of CBS’s
radio past represents the kind of blowing things up that she has vowed to do.
So, what’s it going to be then, eh? Clinging to the old ways or blowing
them up?
So far, it’s been a little bit of both.