The Tony “Toprah” Dokoupil (more on that below) era of the CBS Evening News is officially underway, but the new host does not appear to be drawing new eyeballs to the beleaguered broadcast.
The program’s already anemic ratings have taken a further hit since Dokoupil’s arrival, while his anchoring style has also come under scrutiny amid teleprompter miscues, tears, and eyebrow-raising rants.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Emily Jashinsky, host of MK Media’s After Party, to discuss why “it’s not going well” for CBS or Dokoupil at the moment.
How It’s Going
Last week, Megyn predicted that Dokoupil and new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss would not be able to save the CBS Evening News because the format is no longer relevant and Dokoupil is not the person to return it to relevancy.
In a promo posted before the official launch of the show, Dokoupil sat in the newsroom – sans suit jacket – and acknowledged that people don’t trust corporate media anymore. He blamed it on the press putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on… average Americans.”
At the time, Megyn said the anti-elite rebrand was too little, too late. “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,” she said. “You should have talked to reporter[s]… 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.”
She said the show “is going to fail” and doubled down on her prediction after the network tried to promote the show with a clip of Dokoupil crying while reminiscing about his childhood in Florida. The waterworks led Megyn to coin a new nickname for the anchor. “Toprah Dokoupil… that’s what I call him because he is crying and constantly trying to therapize us through the news,” she joked.
The latest awkward moment for the show came Tuesday after Dokoupil interviewed President Donald Trump in Detroit. The two butted heads over whether the anchor would have landed the role if Kamala Harris had been elected. Trump seemed to credit himself for Skydance’s takeover of the network and the editorial changes that have followed. That did not appear to sit well with Dokoupil, who ended the program with this sign off:
“We are not even two weeks now into the new year, and it feels like a decade has passed. The U.S. captured Venezuela’s former President Nicolas Maduro. Reports are that as many as 12,000 protesters have been killed by Iran’s government as Trump weighs intervention. Anti-ICE protesters have taken to the streets of Minneapolis after the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good. And tonight, we walked into not one but two exclusive, news-making conversations – the CEO of General Motors on the future of American made cars, and the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, on the questions that matter most. 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.”
Megyn was not impressed. “I cannot get over how he continues to patronize the audience,” she said. “You have 19 minutes of content. Get up and down on the news and stop trying to hand-hold your audience like they are a bunch of babies who need you to stroke them through every update.”
She also took issue with the false bravado. “And the summary at the end of all the ‘big stories’ that he is handling… He got a stand up, passing interview with Donald Trump, which literally everybody who is on Air Force One gets every day,” Megyn noted. “He is trying to spin it as some big get.”
The Ratings
Ultimately, what matters is what viewers think and the numbers don’t look good so far. Variety reported viewership for the first five days of Dokoupil’s tenure was down 23 percent from the previous year. At that time, then-anchor Norah O’Donnell was covering the California wildfires and Trump’s upcoming inauguration.
Nielsen data found Dokoupil averaged 4.17 million viewers from January 5 to January 9 compared to nearly 5.4 million the year prior. Most damning, the show also slipped with the advertiser-coveted 25 to 54 year old demographic. Viewership in the demo was down 23 percent from 690,000 in January 2025 to 533,000.
Dokoupil’s debut also failed to match that of his predecessors. When Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson took over the show from O’Donnell in late January 2025, they captured an average of 4.8 million during their first week.
Jashinsky said the data gets even worse for CBS when you factor in how it is performing against its competitors. CBS Evening News continues to find itself in third place behind ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC’s NBC Nightly News. They drew audiences of 8.1 million and 6.73 million last week, respectively.
ABC and NBC also suffered smaller losses year over year. “NBC and ABC were also down year over year, but by 9 percent. CBS is down 23 percent,” Jashinsky noted. “So, when you are putting all of this money into a splashy advertising debut and campaign and you are actually down double digits more than your competitors year over year – I mean, we all know the medium of nightly news is dying.”
‘Not Going Well’
In today’s media landscape, Jashinsky said “authenticity” and “transparency” are the name of the game and Dokoupil, at least thus far, is lacking both.
“The kind of grand theory of why this is failing is that everybody wants their news to be delivered with authenticity and transparency. They kind of want to know where people are coming from when they give them the news, to treat them like adults and say, ‘You’re smart enough to figure this out on your own. I don’t need to handhold you. I don’t need to remind you of every story that was covered in the last week,'” she posited. “What the hell was he doing there? They are trying to punctuate their coverage with this profundity… They are telling the American people things are really tense right now. Yes, that’s why we’re watching your show, so that you use your breath telling us actually what is happening.”
Megyn agreed. “It is not going well over at CBS. And if they were smart, they would listen to yours truly and other critics about the many, many things they are doing wrong,” she concluded. “But I am kind of also not rooting for them to listen because it is fun to watch.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Jashinsky by tuning in to episode 1,230 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.