I tweeted about this on New Year’s Day when it was first posted, but I believe the new experiment over at CBS Evening News is going to fail. CBS shared a video of Tony Dokoupil, the new CBS Evening News anchor who no one has heard of, talking about the program’s new mission.
Here’s a bit of what he said:
DOKOUPIL: …People do not trust us like they used to… On too many stories, the press has missed the story because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you… I have felt this way too. I have felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn’t reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life, and that the most urgent questions simply weren’t being asked…
Good try, but it is going to fail. CBS Evening News will fail. CBS News will not be turned around by Bari Weiss or anybody else. I’m sorry, but its days have passed.
For the past two decades, CBS has never seriously been in the running for dominance in the morning or the evening or any place else in the lineup. It was living off of its legacy from the Walter Cronkite years, which Dan Rather maintained for some semblance of time before he imploded over fake documents about George W. Bush that were misrepresented on 60 Minutes.
In any event, CBS News has not been relevant for forever. It doesn’t matter who they put in the Evening News chair. It doesn’t matter how late in the game they realized that none of us trusts or, more importantly, needs them any more.
Tony Dokoupil can take off his suit jacket and act like Joe Friday, my buddy who’s just going to be there trusting me, the consumer, and what matters to me, but it is too late. You should have talked to reporter Jonah Kaplan and others like him about how to report on real stories before you try to sell us this line of bullshit and clasp to some last gasp of relevance at a time in which the world has moved past the dinosaur that is evening news.
This guy has been at CBS News for nine years. He was at NBC News prior to that. What did you do, Tony, to show that you had an objection to the way CBS News was covering anything? Because all I remember of Tony Dokoupil is he stood up to Ta-Nehisi Coates – who spent 10 days in Israel and declared himself an expert on the ‘oppression’ happening over there – and did a good job cross examining him on his empty, meaningless book when he was co-host of CBS Mornings. He did a good job there.
What else has Tony done? Seriously, what is a single instance in which he has stood up for the ‘Regular Joe’ on corporate media bias? There are none. This is revisionist history meant to set him as the new ‘truth teller.’ Where was he standing up for people who were in the independent lane trying to tell the truth about media, about government, about the Biden administration? I don’t remember you, Tony.
So, I find this utter bullshit condescension, and I do believe it will fail, as all these networks are failing, because the audience has caught on to their bullshit.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,223 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.