CBS News demonstrated its coziness with the Trump administration on Tuesday night’s broadcast of the “CBS Evening News,” in which anchor Tony Dokoupil praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio and regurgitated right-wing propaganda about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Discussing Rubio’s role in the abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the administration’s widely criticized rhetoric about taking over Greenland, Dokoupil joked about AI-generated memes referencing Rubio.
“Marco Rubio, we salute you,” Dokoupil concluded. “You’re the ultimate Florida man.”
On the same edition of the program, Dokoupil reported on the fifth anniversary of Trump supporter’s Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But instead of accurately stating the facts of the story, he portrayed the Trump administration’s revisionist history of the riot as merely the other side of the story.
“President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of ‘whitewashing it,’” Dokoupil said.
Bari Weiss, a conservative activist and the newly minted editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Dokoupil’s pro-administration propaganda is part of CBS News’ right-wing restructuring under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, a conservative activist.
Late last year, CBS recently came under widespread criticism after it abruptly shelved a “60 Minutes” report on the Trump administration’s use of a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Weiss has also worked to purge the networks standards department.
Democrats have warned CBS’ parent company, Paramount, that it will likely become the subject of investigations under a Democratic House majority after Paramount chose to pay Trump a multimillion-dollar bribe near the beginning of his new term. The network settled a frivolous lawsuit brought by Trump, and soon after, the administration approved a merger between Paramount and Skydance.
CBS also chose to cancel “The Late Show,” hosted by longtime Trump critic Stephen Colbert.
With the recently installed Dokoupil leading the network’s key news show, the content already sounds more like the right-wing rantings of Fox News than the historic journalism the outlet was known for.
CBS’ devolution is part of a pattern with other media outlets, which have catered to Trump for years and increased their pro-Trump content after his victory in the 2024 election.
