Tony Dokoupil named solo anchor of 'CBS Evening News,' replacing Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson

With "Evening News" co-anchors Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson leaving, CBS has wasted no time in naming their replacement: Tony Dokoupil, the network's morning show co-host, will become solo anchor of the venerable weeknight newscast starting Jan. 5.

Dokoupil, who was widely expected to get the job, broke the news himself on Wednesday's edition of "CBS Mornings," saying, "It's a really important show at an important time [and] has a massively important history — the most storied, battle-scarred program in television news."

Counting interim anchors, along with legends like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, Dokoupil, becomes the 12th anchor of the broadcast — a commanding TV news presence during the Cronkite years, and a distant also-ran in recent ones.

In a statement, CBS said, "In his first month, Dokoupil will get out from behind his desk and meet you in cities and towns across America. His cross country tour builds on two decades of journalism spanning the globe and on the instinct that has defined his coverage: to go where the story is."

In essence, that alone addresses a challenge the prior team faced almost immediately when they joined the struggling broadcast earlier this year. Port Jefferson native DuBois and  Dickerson were thrown before a national audience with little introduction or rationale. DuBois had no national profile when he joined the program. Dokoupil — formerly a writer with Newsweek, and later a reporter with MSNBC before joining CBS News in 2016 — has been at "CBS Mornings" since 2019, although the star of that show is Gayle King.

Dokoupil — pronounced da-KOH-pull — did attract some national press attention during a September 2024 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was on the show to promote his new book, "The Message." Dokoupil pointedly pressed Coates on some of the claims he made in the book, then observed it "would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist." The comments sparked an internal debate at the news division, with bosses (reportedly) criticizing Dokoupil for injecting his political viewpoints into a news interview. Coates' book was in part about a 2023 trip to Israel and the West Bank, which sharply criticized Israeli policies. Dokoupil, according to reports at the time, had children living in Israel with his ex-wife, and had voiced concern over their safety. (He's now married to Katy Tur, of MS Now.)

The fracas came to the attention of Bari Weiss' The Free Press, which broke the story; The Free Press was sold to CBS parent Paramount Skydance earlier this year for $150 million and Weiss was also named CBS News editor-in-chief at the time.

In a statement Wednesday, Weiss said, "We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media. Tony Dokoupil is the person to win it back. That’s because he believes in old school journalistic values: asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account. Americans hungry for fairness will see that on display night after night."

At "CBS Mornings," Dokoupil has been the broadcast's lead reporter on the ground for various stories, including — according to a partial list supplied by the network — the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel, the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the Maui and California wildfires. More recently in an interview with former Patriots coach Bill Belichick, he asked how he and his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, had met. Hudson, who was monitoring the interview, objected to the question, and Dokoupil — in that brief instance — fully secured the national limelight for what may have been the first time in his career.

A Farmington, Connecticut, native, Dokoupil was raised in Miami. His early life was colorful. His estranged father was a major pot trafficker and dealer — known as the "Old Man" — whom Dokoupil wrote about in a 2014 memoir, "The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana."

"At his peak in the mid-1980s," Dokoupil wrote, "In a single load he supplied enough marijuana to levitate every college-age person in America and send them sideways to the store for snacks."

At "Evening News," he joins a struggling program: deep in third place, with around 4 million viewers, or 2 million behind second place "NBC Nightly News." "Evening News" has been in third place for decades, despite frequent anchor changes and format overhauls. At least Dokoupil will get some help: Matt Gutman, a prominent reporter at "ABC World News Tonight," was poached by CBS this week. He'll become the network's (and "Evening News") chief correspondent.