CBS News has now been through the ringer press-wise.
There’s been nothing about dire negativity since Bari Weiss took over, installed Tony Dokoupil on the Evening News, and ran roughshod over “60 Minutes.”
According to Adweek, CBS Evening News for the week of August 10th dropped to 3.785 million viewers. That was down by about 120,000 from the previous week.
This puts Dokoupil’s show on a par with the weird CBS Evening News from a year ago with Maurice Dubois and John Dickerson. No one was watching then, and no one is watching now.
Meantime, the ABC and NBC news shows were up for the week year-to-year and far ahead of CBS. Personally, I’ve been checking out Tom Llamas’s show on NBC, which is doing a good job right now. ABC’s David Muir and summer subs seem to be focused on the weather and strange murders and kidnappings. It’s like a local news show meets Dateline.
The continually dropping ratings for Dokoupil, as well as the CBS Mornings show, are definitely tied to the ill feeling toward CBS that Weiss has created this year. The question is, will that spread to “60 Minutes” next month?
Already “60 Minutes” reruns have cut out the correspondents who were fired — Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega. Soon there will be a raft of new people totally unfamiliar to CBS News audiences and everyone, actually.
“60 Minutes” fall ratings ride largely on the coattails of football. As the NFL games bleed overtime, they push a few million fans into the news program. So it will be hard to tell right away how the new “60 Minutes” fares until it stands alone, or if the fall off per quarter hour is detectable
For the moment, though, the news for CBS Evening News is just getting worse and worse.
