(Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
Tony Dokoupil’s two-week summer vacation has produced an “awkward result” for CBS News, with his temporary replacement posting the CBS Evening News’ strongest weekly audience in months, according to figures cited by Oliver Darcy.
As was revealed in the Thursday edition of Status News, with Darcy calling the matter “an unexpected and somewhat awkward result for CBS News,” Matt Gutman averaged 4.1 million viewers during his first week filling in for Dokoupil, marking the program’s best performance in 17 weeks and the first time the broadcast has topped the 4 million-viewer mark since late March.
As Darcy noted, CBS Evening News has struggled to consistently reach that audience level since editor-in-chief Bari Weiss oversaw a major overhaul of the broadcast earlier this year, despite executives once considering it the “minimum acceptable audience” for the program. While Dokoupil hit an even 4 million viewers during the week of June 22, Status reported that he had not exceeded that threshold since averaging 4.2 million viewers during the week of March 30.
The figures also seem to have fueled questions about Dokoupil taking a two-week vacation less than a year into his tenure as anchor.
One source, who Darcy described as a veteran television executive, told Status, “Summer is when the second and third place networks try to make progress against the first place anchor who goes on vacation. In this case, the third place anchor took off for two weeks — a baffling move given his collapsing show — and his substitute outclassed him in the ratings.”
That same source added of Doukoupil’s absence that they’d “never seen this before,” and that the situation amounts to “another dagger in Tony’s neck.”
Furthermore, Darcy reported that within the CBS newsroom, employees were struck by how “likeable” and “personable” Gutman proved to be.
In April, Vanity Fair Washington correspondent and former Mediaite editor-in-chief Aidan McLaughlin published a profile for which he interviewed “more than 20 current and former CBS staffers and industry insiders” about Dokoupil’s role at the network, with one correspondent describing him as a “useful idiot” in Weiss’ eyes, and another bashing him as “deeply lacking in self-awareness.”
The post ‘Awkward’: Tony Dokoupil’s Fill-In Delivers CBS Evening News’ Best Ratings in Four Months first appeared on Mediaite.
