Why CBS Evening News May Never Recover from Bari Weiss' Meddling

Just how bad are things at CBS? Insiders and seasoned pros say it's an absolute "trainwreck."

Illustration by Riley Levine

Seven months after a partisan newsletter editor with zero broadcast experience was handed the top job at CBS News, you might not be surprised to learn that the legendary news network is flailing. Bari Weiss’ scheme to transform the non-political news giant into a 21st century MAGA-coded digital media outlet is, instead, an old-fashioned train wreck.

The network’s credibility is suffering with the right wing content shift and 24/7 chaos, top talent is leaving or being pushed out the door as political litmus tests are becoming the norm and the audience is fleeing. The CBS Morning News “saw its lowest-rated April on record” and the network’s marquee evening newscast has hit new lows “not seen in this century.”

The latest headlines are brutal:

• CBS’ Ratings Calamity

• CBS Evening News Keeps Hemorrhaging Viewers to Record Lows

• ‘CBS Evening News’ Ratings Disaster: Tony Dokoupil Hits Rock Bottom

• MAGA-Coded CBS Anchor Hit With ‘Trainwreck’ Ratings Downfall

• More bad news for Bari Weiss’ CBS as viewership nosedived in latest Nielsen ratings

The ratings collapse at the CBS Evening News began almost immediately after Weiss relaunched the program in January with her handpicked anchor, Tony Dokoupil. After a series of on-air stumbles, meek interviews with Donald Trump and administration officials, and an awkward salute to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the newscast “experienced its worst January this century.”

That trend shows no sign of stopping. In April, the program continued to crater. Oliver Darcy’s “Status” newsletter called Weiss “Loser of the Week,” and spelled out the dire ratings situation like this:

“Ultimately, April 2026 ranked as the second lowest-rated April for the “CBS Evening News” this century in total viewers—and the lowest ever in the 25–54 demographic. In that key demo, Dokoupil’s broadcast has now posted 12 straight weeks below 600,000 viewers, undercutting Weiss’ push to reinvent the broadcast to resonate with younger audiences.

It may be impossible for the CBS Evening News to recover from this ratings debacle especially heading into summer when it’s harder to get an audience for anything. The storied news broadcast that used to feature hard hitting journalism and news heavyweights like Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer could be beyond repair.

How Things Are Supposed to Work

I’ve held various leadership positions in a handful of local television newsrooms in big cities with fierce competition. Local news differs from network news, but many of the same rules apply no matter how many newscasts you produce or the size and reach of your reporting team.

One thing everyone with actual broadcast experience knows is that you have only a few opportunities to change entrenched viewing habits or reach new viewers: when you launch a new or retooled show, add new marquee talent, and during breaking or big news events. It’s also critical to hang on to your existing audience while making any big changes. Beyond a couple of limited ratings blips, Weiss has failed to capitalize on any those opportunities, steadily losing existing viewers and failing to attract new ones.

Good News for ABC

As in any business, the other way to grow the audience is when your competition screws up. The Weiss fiasco is proving very good news for NBC and ABC. Both news networks have long out-paced the perennial third place CBS but now that gap is growing even wider. ABC News is the biggest winner of all. David Muir’s “World News Tonight” broadcast now has more than twice the audience of the Weiss/Dokoupil program at CBS. For example, during the week of April 20th, 8.5 million people tuned in to Muir’s program while a paltry 3.7 million watched CBS. (NBC’s audience that week was 6.1 million).

ABC also won the ratings battle during the last quarter and is on track to win the year for the 10th time in a row. Ad Week’s Mark Mwachiro wrote, “ABC World News Tonight with David Muir continues to cement itself as the No. 1 newscast in America.” With that ratings bonanza, you can bet that ABC execs hope Weiss keeps doing exactly what she’s doing.

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Burning Down the House of Cronkite

There is no sign yet that the oligarchs who own CBS are concerned about Weiss’ commercial failure. David and Larry Ellison continue to treat CBS like a party favor for Donald Trump while Weiss uses the network to purge staffers she deems not sufficiently pro-Israel and elevate Trump-friendly and inexperienced folks from her Substack blog.

I’m flabbergasted by the Vanity Fair anecdote about how Weiss placed comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s inexperienced daughter on the CBS Evening News writing staff. Landing a job at CBS News used to require years of training and experience, now authoring a few feature pieces for a blog is all it takes.

But inexperience is the new norm at CBS and it shows. Remember the eye-popping on-air blunders on Dokoupil’s debut broadcast? The NYT reported that Weiss herself was editing the script that caused Dokoupil to stumble. Now Vanity Fair reports that those changes Weiss was making were, you guessed it, to make the script more Trump-friendly.

“After some objections from the show’s producers, she was given access and proceeded to add a few lines to a January 5 segment on the US military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro. Weiss’s edits, according to a former CBS producer, sought to cast President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia, and Iran.

“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” recalls the producer. The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds. “First day, big problems here,” he told the millions of viewers who’d tuned in.”

It’s impossible to overstate how inappropriate it is for anyone to put a newscast at risk like this. That there was an overt political aspect to it makes it even worse.

60 Minutes Could Be Next

But the Ellisons don’t care. They have a large portfolio. The business advantage of replacing non-partisan news with MAGA-coded news makes the President happy and the Executive branch cooperative.

Meanwhile, those who care about fact-based news cannot help but watch in horror and sadness as Bari Weiss prepares to bring her inexperience, arrogance and right wing political ideology to 60 Minutes next. What could possibly go wrong?