CBS Boss ROCKED As Viewers Flee In Massive Plunge Over Anchor Disaster

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]All right, to other news, as you just heard from Jill, well, as to other news now, to Governor Walls. No, we're going to do Mark Kelly.

[00:00:07]First day, first day, big problems here.

[00:00:11]What are we going to Kelly here?

[00:00:15]What What's going What First day, big problems. Yeah, the issue is, um, first day, big problems. Second day, big problems. Third, fourth, and fifth day, lingering and worsening problems, actually, for Tony Dokoupil right there.

[00:00:29]Now, he is Bari Weiss's minion, although some insiders are calling him Bari Weiss's [ __ ] And, uh, yeah, that first broadcast didn't go well, and overall, it's not going well for Tony Dokoupil, not going well for CBS News. And if the rebrand of CBS News to being MAGA-friendly, Trump-friendly was supposed to help business, it's not going well for Bari Weiss, either. And we have the data to prove it. And in doing so, perhaps to prove the idea that if you go anti-woke, you just might go broke. So, he had started off his first broadcast calling himself a new Walter Cronkite, which is really setting yourself up to fail. So, he pulled in over 4 million total viewers for the week. The issue is just 450,000 of them came from the like the most wanted demo, 25 to 54. The broadcast was down 9% in total viewers, 21% in the demo. That's compared to the previous week, so it just gets worse for them. Even more concerning, drop in total viewers and a 28% decline in the demo. Now, that's bad. You know what makes it worse? It's not like all media during this time was hurting.

[00:01:43]During that same time period, shows on ABC and NBC have had an increase of 4 and 16%.

[00:01:51]But actually, this is not a difficult puzzle to figure out. You know where I think those 4 and 16% came from?

[00:01:57]Former CBS News viewers fleeing Tony Dokoupil and Barry Weiss's MAGA mess.

[00:02:04]There's a lot of other numbers that we can get to about how overall the ratings have been bad.

[00:02:09]Nielsen data showed a 22% viewership decline for Dokoupil since his January debut.

[00:02:17]When you compare it to other anchor debuts, this is on CBS News. So you have 17% from the start of Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson.

[00:02:28]Down 20% from Norah O'Donnell before them. Down whopping 67% from Katie Couric's premiere in 2006. So it's not looking good in comparison to other times they've changed the guard at CBS too. So look overall the strategy doesn't seem good. They've had a lot of bad press, but also Tony Dokoupil might just suck at this.

[00:02:47]But anyway, the insiders are now speaking out. One said that's not noise, that's a trend, and trends get people replaced. One other insider said it's hard to come from a place of authority when everyone, including you, knows you're just Barry's [ __ ] Curious to see how much longer the Ellisons will tolerate this utter defenestration of CBS News before they step in. Although my suspicion has always been that it isn't really about increasing viewership. It's about producing news that's acceptable to the regime. But that's it. That's just my theory.

[00:03:19]Sharon, what do you think? I think you're spot on. They don't really care about success. And Tony Dokoupil, well, that didn't take long. But they don't care about success at all. They're going to cut They're going to make it the budget for news anyway. So they're going to save a lot of money there. And all they need to do is prop it up. I think the numbers are actually lower. You have a lot of older viewers who are just treat CBS as appointment television. It took them a little while to even catch up and say, "What's going on? Something different's going [clears throat] on here." And now they'll find something else or they'll just tune out all together and not watch anything else.

[00:03:54]But I don't think they give a damn about profits off of news. It's a vehicle. And what they're earning from the Trump administration being, you know, grateful for their efforts is probably worth tenfold what they would make off of CBS.

[00:04:10]Yeah. Yeah, that that is my actual suspicion. And we'll definitely see.