It’s early in the season for the new anchor of the storied CBS Evening News, but with three regular broadcasts, Tony Dokoupil has fouled out every night. That doesn’t look good for the third-place network news show.

Breaking news can always disrupt a carefully planned remote newscast that is out of the studio and on location. On Wednesday, January 7, when the CBS Evening News was broadcast from the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the lead story was, of course, the shooting by an ICE agent of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

As with the previous nights (and on Dokoupil’s first unscheduled breaking news on Saturday after the capture of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro) the pace of the show is interrupted with a long “exclusive” interview with a someone friendly to the Trump administration, in this case “Border Czar” Tom Homan. Homan, as an old-time cop, wasn’t going to make any real judgement on the shooting, For once in four interviews, Dokoupil was tougher with his questions. I suspect that has little to do with the role of journalists to hold officials to account than by the fact the audience had already seen the video of the shooting.

On the seizure of the Russia bound oil tanker, as well as “declassified” US military video, CBS News used video from RT, Russian television, (the RT green bug was on the screen) without flagging to the viewer the fact it was Russian.

There was a voice over segment on heavy snow in Alaska which made me wonder just what is going on at CBS News. I live in Kitimat, just south of Alaska, (Kitimat means “people of the snow” in an indigenous language) and this time of year we do get a lot of snow (as on Dec. 28). Yes there was a holiday but local media in Alaska was reporting the snow was sinking boats on January 2 five days earlier (KTUU is a twin stick affiliated with both CBS and NBC). I saw what are likely (but can’t confirm) the same pictures broadcast by CBS on Facebook a week ago.

The show ended with Dokoupil taking a helicopter tour with billionaire Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. It was another of the puff pieces that have ended the show for the past three days. With CBS and its parent Paramount now owned by the billionaire Ellison family can viewers expect more items praising famous men (America’s billionaires)? This when Dokoupil had said “the press has missed the story, because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American.” He does a puff piece with a billionaire.

Now it’s hard to know what the CBS show planned for Texas if segments were thrown out due to breaking news At the same time the most controversial local story of the day was that another university, Texas A&M was censoring the teaching of Plato in philosophy classes.

The show ended with a small group of people cheering Dokoupil. A few fans or perhaps a claque. I am not suggesting the fans were paid but it did remind me of the historic definition of a claque “an organized body of professional applauders in French theaters and opera houses who were paid by performers to create the illusion of a more enthusiastic audience reaction.”

The new slogan for the CBS Evening News is “Live from America.” What does that mean, really? Whether national network or local, unless the anchor and the team are overseas, all the shows are live from somewhere in America. The message from new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and Dokoupil comes from the fifth part of his manifesto “We Love America” or maybe they only love just MAGA Americans. For just what that should really mean see Margaret Sullivan’s substack Should the news media ‘love America’? Here’s how. Not the way CBS News seems to have in mind

What stood out for me on Tuesday’s show was Dokoupil’s interview with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Machado, another long segment that breaks up the pacing of the show. If one my journalism student had done that interview (rather than an experienced anchor) it would have received failing grade. Dokoupil asked Machado leading question after leading question to get the answers he wanted, rather than the standard practice of asking open ended questions that allows the interviewee to answer in their own way with the journalist ready to challenge the answer if warranted.

As I watched the segment, I could imagine lawyers watching the show across America rising to their feet and yelling at their televisions, “Objection, leading the witness.”

The Tuesday show also featured a non challenging interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem and ended in a flattering voice over profile of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a multi tasking Florida man. Both could have been segments out of RT, Russian television on Putin and his cronies. As critics have pointed out the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection was mentioned only in a passing voice over.

The Monday show was featured with Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr’s changes to the vaccine guidelines. The item with CBS medical reporter Dr. Jon Lapook was a confusing mashup of a medical story, which seemed to tilt toward the anti-vaxxers with Dokoupil asking There are parents out there who are celebrating this” with Lapook trying mightily to explain medical facts. You only have to look a previous Lapook segments that actually did explain the medical issues, with former anchors Nora O’Donnell, John Dickerson and Maurice Dubois to see what a disaster Dokopil is.

The closing segment was something that might have come from a desperate local show, on a New Year nude calendar, rather than a once prestigious network.

There is little need to mention the 22-minute sycophantic unchallenging interview Dokoupil did on Saturday with so called Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on the abduction of Maduro. As I noted on Facebook at the time, it also could have been an interview with Putin on Russian television.

I grew up a fan of Walter Cronkite even before who I knew who he was. Every Sunday I would watch the taped CBS Show The Twentieth Century one of the things had sparked my life long fascination with history. (In Kitimat, when we first got television in the early 1960s, everything was on tape because there were no microwave towers for live transmissions. The CBC News was a fifteen-minute film package airlifted to the local station. We had to wait two weeks for the taped version to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan).

Once we moved to Toronto as a teenager, I discovered who Walter Cronkie was and from then on would always watch the CBS Evening News (and occasionally NBC with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley) in addition to CBC News and CTV News. The US networks (and the Canadian and British as well) were dominated by white males, but they were men who been on the ground covering stories form the Second World War to Korea to Vietnam to the US Civil Rights marches and other stories, dedicated as much as they could to making sure the public was informed of what was going on.

Now CBS News is third in the traditional network ratings in the US and it is clear that the show will continue to decline.

As journalism professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis points out “In Cronkite’s last full year as anchor of the CBS Evening News, the show was No. 1 in news, watched by almost 16 million viewers — seven percent of the population at the time. Last month, the show was watched by 4.36 million people — a mere 1.25 percent of the nation. And that audience is geriatric. Their median age is 58, and Evening News attracts only half a million viewers in the prized 25-54 age demographic.”

Variety in its review notes “Dokoupil lacks the charisma and aptitude” to bring the show to life. After almost forty years working in network television news, I know there is a certain something that makes an anchor successful, whether local or national, sometimes called “anchor chops.” That includes on the ground reporting experience, local, national and internationally, credibility as a reporter, and most important a combination of both gravitas, charisma and empathy that connects directly to the viewer at home.

Over the decades all networks have tried out excellent reporters and presenters who, through no fault of their own, just don’t have the magic touch and those people move on. Just like the characters in the 1987 film Broadcast News where anchor Tom Grunick (William Hurt) makes it despite some limitations while Aaron Altman (Aaron Books) doesn’t.

In my view Dokoupil doesn’t have the magic touch. The broadcasts, so far, are wooden. He was chosen by Bari Weiss for ideological reasons. (That may change as the show evolves)

What happens if the CBS News ratings continue to drop? If CBS was an traditional commercial broadcaster, a ratings plunge would mean a new and hopefully fresh look and changes to bring back the audience. But with the right-wing billionaire Ellison family now owners of Paramount Plus, you have to wonder with their deep pockets, will ratings trump ideology?

In the past centuries many great and successful news organizations have disappeared, out of business or merged with others that were also close to failure. It is highly likely that CBS will now die a slow, lingering and painful death.

The long slow death of most of the news media in a free society is a subject of another blog (if I ever have the heart to write it). When once almost everyone tuned into the evening news of their choice and most people read not one but several newspapers, today the search for facts is fragmented and distorted by social media algorithms and the billionaire or equity fund owners of the surviving legacy media.
There are still journalists working every day under increasingly challenging circumstances and economics, sometimes risking their lives. At a time of an increasingly polarized and chaotic planet, verifiable facts are need more than ever. Where were those facts come from?

You can also see Associated Press review An eventful first week in his job for CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil, maybe not as intended

Note: I was also thinking of using a three strikes and you’re out sports anlogy, but with Dokoupil’s debut on Saturday making it a fourth show, fouling out was better in this case.