We are now three months into Tony Dokoupil’s stint as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and the highly promoted revamp of the storied news program does not seem to be going according to plan.
Ratings continue to fall, with numbers now reaching the same worrisome levels that, in part, led the network to shake up the program in the first place.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Tangle News’ Kmele Foster to discuss Dokoupil’s downward spiral and what it signals about the demise of legacy media as a whole.
The Numbers
Last week, Variety’s Brian Steinberg reported CBS Evening News is “back where executives at the news division behind the show hoped never to return.” Viewership for the program hosted by Dokoupil once again dropped below 4 million viewers.
Citing data from Nielsen, Steinberg noted the “overall audience” for the five days ending March 13 stood at around 3.83 million, with just 468,000 between the advertiser-coveted 25- to 54-year-old demographic. CBS News apparently “retitled” the Friday broadcast of its nightly news program, so those results are not included in the tabulations.
According to Steinberg, that 4 million figure marks “a critical demarcation point that previously spurred alarm at the Paramount Skydance news division.” The version of CBS Evening News anchored by Dokoupil’s predecessors, Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson, was reportedly scrapped after the audience fell below 4 million viewers on many weeknights.
For comparison, ABC News’ top-rated World News Tonight had an average of nearly 8.48 million and 1.03 million in the demo, while NBC Nightly News brought in an average of 6.51 million overall and 946,000 in the demo in the same time period.
‘Network News Is Dead’
Megyn predicted CBS’ attempted rebrand of the program would fail from the moment it released a promo for the show with a suit jacket-less Dokoupil talking about how people don’t trust the media like they used to, but she believes it is not just a CBS problem.
“Network news is dead. That’s my takeaway,” she said. “You can put Tony in there. You can put Maurice and what’s-his-name in there. It’s not the anchor. It’s not the management. It’s the animal. It’s dead… and there is no saving it no matter how many rescue teams you send with paddles.”
As Foster explained, the entire media landscape has shifted. “People are watching most things online. They’re watching YouTubers. They’re watching independent media voices. They’re mostly consuming clips,” he noted. “Younger audiences are – unfortunately or not – consuming a lot of their news and getting a lot of their news from TikTok and Instagram.”
And while legacy outlets like CBS, NBC, and ABC used to coast by on the, well, legacies of their once-vaunted reputations, that is no longer the case. “It is [now] an unforgiving, fast-moving media ecosystem. There are new entrants all the time. There are new voices all the time,” Foster explained. “Competing with those new brands and emerging brands is not the sort of thing you’re going to be able to do if most of what you’re doing is depending on the fact that, hey, we’re CBS News. We’re supposed to be important. We’re supposed to be relevant.”
Ultimately, Megyn said the clock is ticking for CBS and the like. “It is not turnaroundable,” she concluded. “It is like a sinking aircraft carrier that you’re trying to put water wings on and puff, puff, puff them up. It’s not going to work. It’s an aircraft carrier. It’s going to the bottom of the ocean.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Foster by tuning in to episode 1,279 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.