Given the Media Research Center’s flip-flop on him, it’s no surprise that it found Tony Dokoupil’s debaut as CBS Evening News anchor to be to its liking (read: sufficiently right-leaning). Gush away, Curtis Houck:
Following an unscheduled, two-day soft launch thanks to the U.S. military action in Venezuela to capture dictator Nicolas Maduro, Monday marked the first official episode of the new CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil that, aside from a teleprompter snafu, came off as refreshingly down-the-middle and normal.
One might suggest normal might convey a feeling of boredom or staleness. But in this deeply partisan world and a legacy, elite media that have long lost the trust of the wider public, it’s what we need.
Looking back at our reviews of the first CBS Evening News episodes of predecessors Norah O’Donnell and the team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, it was a marked and welcome change that, as we had hoped, was more in line with the days of Jeff Glor.
Dokoupil was named anchor back on December 10, so there was little time to instigate a quick turnaround with graphics and theme music. As such, the font was tweaked and CBS threwback to theme music from 40 years ago:
Given that the MRC trashed both O’Donnell and Dickerson, Houck’s gushing was nor a surprise. He even praised Dokoupil’s handling of a teleprompter snafu:
Next came the teleprompter snafu, but Dokoupil handled it well, eventually getting to a news brief on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest moves against Democrat Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) and a full story about Democrat Governor Tim Walz (MN) dropping his reelection bid over the state’s Somali fraud scandal:
Houck concluded with more gushing:
Will we be singing the praises of the Dokoupil-led Evening News every night? Of course not. In fact, it’s a safe bet NewsBusters will be calling them out plenty for missing this story or that story. We made that clear when he was hired, although his recent track record has been hopeful.
For example, Dokoupil buried in a commercial break chyron the arrest of man for allegedly attacking Vice President JD Vance’s Cincinnati, Ohio-area home.
But given the knives already out for Dokoupil and Weiss from many of the so-called media reporters, nuance does not appear to exist in the ether.
Of course, nuance is not associated with Houck and the MRC. Indeed, he went on to dismiss a less-than-positive review of Dokoupil as comingfrom an “Oliver Darcy wannabe.”
Jorge Bonilla followed with a Jan. 7 post praising Dokoupil and CBS for sticking to the right-wing narrative:
In the immediate aftermath of the capture and extradition of strongman Nicolas Maduro and his wife, the situation on the ground in Venezuela has become increasingly complicated. Only one network has accurately reported on the marauding pro-regime goon squad whose mission is to terrorize everyday citizens into compliance with the regime.
Watch the report in its entirety as aired on the CBS Evening News on Tuesday, January 6th, 2026:
[…]CBS is the first among the network newscasts to bring this critical awareness to viewers, and for that they should be commended. Oliver Darcy might cry again. So be it.
The MRC hates Darcy for refusing to adhere to its right-wing agenda.
The same day, Tim Graham helped play language cop for CBS:
The British socialist newspaper The Guardian is upset that CBS News might become less radical, publishing an article provocatively titled “‘Blood in the water’: Bari Weiss’s chaotic first three months in charge of CBS News.” They want Bari to bleed.
This spin announces an agenda: Weiss Must Be Stopped! The Left cannot stand any outlet on their side moving two degrees toward the center. Any tiptoe to the middle is “anti-journalism.” Any hint at an opposing conservative view is a slippery slope to “misinformation.”
Guardian “media & power reporter” Jeremy Barr quoted a pile of anonymous CBS staffers in service to his anti-Weiss agenda. He referred in this story to a previously unreported November 6 “blow-up among staffers about language choices when writing about transgender individuals.”
[…]Now this is where the rubber meets the road. Wokeness dominates the elitist media. “Style books” are surrender manuals to ideological manipulation of terminology. Facts are shredded in favor of feelings. So you get Orwellian terms like “gender-affirming care” to describe trying to erase your actual gender.
This is why Barr & Co. hated new CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil’s proclamation that “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.” Transgender ideology is a perfect example. They believe advocates and elites should tell the undereducated “average American” what to think and how to talk.
The Trans Journalism Association demands that “better” coverage means you avoid any reference to actual biological facts in deference to the transgender imagination. Reality is whatever they decide it is, it’s “gender-expansive.” So you get instructions like these: “Avoid references to being born female or born a girl, etc.” That’s too factual.
When it comes to removing breasts or penises, “Terms like ‘mutilation,’ ‘sterilization,’ and ‘social contagion’ invoke common misinformation and disinformation.” This is because they are the spreaders of the “social contagion,” but hate the description. They hate the term “culture war,” because they aim to win it without a real battle.
Of course, Graham and the MRC believe transgender people are victims of “mutilation” and “social contagion,” even though it’s not true.
Houck relied on a right-wing report to gush some more in a Jan. 8 post:
In an exclusive to the New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad ahead of public release by CBS News PR, Nielsen ratings for Monday’s debut of the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil came in and, try as the liberal haters tried to spin it, they were solid with Dokoupil notching 4.4 million total viewers, up a half million people than average.
“That’s half-a-million more sets of eyeballs on average than what the broadcast had been getting under previous co-anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who helmed the ratings-challenged show for roughly one year,” Steigrad wrote.
In reality, Dokoupil’s ratings have remained low throughout his tenure. Houck spent the rest of his post trash-talking anyone who didn’t write about Dokoupil as glowingly as he did.