"CBS Evening News" anchors Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson are...

"CBS Evening News" anchors Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson are the new faces of the network's New York-based national broadcast. Credit: CBS News / Gail Schulman

The “CBS Evening News” launched an overhauled edition Monday, in an attempt to make the case that two anchors are better than one — and that a local weatherman shouldn't hurt the cause either.

Seated around a large shiny anchor desk — a Poland Springs bottle casually set off to the side — those newest anchors, Port Jefferson native Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson, led off with a story on Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which segued into a much longer one on a Navy electrician sentenced to 27 months for bribery and conspiracy after sharing sensitive military information with a Chinese spy.

That piece seemed like something you'd see on “60 Minutes,” which was doubtless intentional — CBS News promises this two-man makeover will be more like that long-running Sunday institution than the faded weeknight one airing at 6:30.

That weatherman? Lonnie Quinn — the same Quinn of WCBS/2 — who popped in to inform viewers that there was snow on the ground in all 50 states.

And that's the way it was Monday, Jan. 27, as the storied broadcast began its sixth anchor change since 2005, when Dan Rather was forced off the program — the most recent anchor departure was last Thursday when Norah O'Donnell wrapped a 5½-year run.

The program also shifted from a Washington-based studio to one back in New York, where "EN" had originated for most of its 62 years as a half-hour broadcast.

Monday's program was a "soft" — or quiet — launch, but the new co-anchors nevertheless made recent promotional pit stops at "Late Show with Stephen Colbert," "Inside Edition," and  "CBS Mornings," where co-host Tony Dokoupil pointedly asked Dickerson "how … this new 'Evening News' [is] going to help with this central problem of our times" — misinformation and disinformation?

Dickerson — who will continue as the network's chief political analyst — replied that "the hope is that instead of bombarding and pelting people and poking at them and agitating them, we can say, 'Here's what we think is happening, here's what we don't know and here are our correspondents on the ground.' "

That was also a good description of O'Donnell's broadcast, which aimed for gravitas as well along with a slower pace to soothe information-addled viewers, or at least remediate the headlong rush of everything else they were getting on TV and social media. The results, nevertheless, were mixed.

For the week ending Jan. 13, O'Donnell's broadcast was seen by only 5 million viewers during an unusually busy news cycle, compared with 8 million for ABC's "World News Tonight." The broadcast's problems date back 30 years to 1994, after a group of major CBS affiliates defected to Fox. That's when "Evening News" first fell to third place. Those ratings problems have since become insurmountable, and they're now as much a part of this proud broadcast's identity as Walter Cronkite once was.

Starting Monday night, it was back to the future. There have been successful dual-anchor programs before ("The Huntley-Brinkley Report") and borderline disasters (Tom Brokaw and Roger Mudd in the early '80s; Dan Rather/Connie Chung in the mid-90s). In theory they're supposed to give broadcasts flexibility, but on a tightly edited and focused program, they can also muddle anchor responsibility — an obvious concern for Monday's opener.

Moreover, by installing two men, CBS has drawn criticism, including from O'Donnell who told Elle magazine for a story published Monday that “I think it’s important to have women in these lead anchor chairs, and I think it is a setback that it’s going to be all men."

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