CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil is looking to make a splash a couple of weeks into his new job.
Dokoupil, who is set to anchor the evening newscast from Detroit, Michigan tonight, is slated to interview President Donald Trump, according to a White House pool report and a source at the network.
The anchor has had a whirlwind start to his tenure at the program, starting a couple of days earlier after the U.S. launched a shock campaign in Venezuela, abducting that country’s president Nicolas Maduro.
He was only named anchor a month ago, in what was the first major programming move of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. His launch was a rocky one, with an unfortunate Teleprompter flub (it was fixed for the west coast version of the broadcast). The ratings for the first week didn’t move the needle, improving slightly from the past few weeks, but the show was still far behind ABC and NBC.
The show also featured a number of curious editorial decisions, garnering outrage or praise (depending on who you ask) in segments about Marco Rubio’s many jobs (Dokoupil proclaimed him “the ultimate Florida man”), and a commentary about the aftermath of the ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis.
The Trump interview is sure to generate similarly intense interest. The president is slated to tour a Ford plant in Michigan, and later deliver remarks to the Detroit Economic Club. Dokoupil is slated to anchor the show from the headquarters of General Motors.
According to The New York Times, Weiss has been focused heavily on the Evening News relaunch, telling staff to think of segments that will go viral, and that “we need to be the news.” Sometimes that may be quirky segments like the meme-focused Rubio bit, but others could be newsmaking interviews, like his chat with White House border czar Tom Homan. As part of his tour of America, Dokoupil interviewed Colorado Governor Jared Polis on Monday.
The Evening News shakeup also comes as Weiss grapples with the fallout from a 60 Minutes segment that she held about the Trump administration’s effort to deport people to a notorious prison in El Salvador. That segment, from correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, is said to be in the process of being reworked in order to get it on air.
Read the full article here
