“CBS Evening News” scored its best weekly audience in months — as struggling anchor Tony Dokoupil was on vacation.
The show averaged 4.1 million viewers for the week of July 27, according to Nielsen, marking the show’s best performance in 17 weeks and the first time the “Evening News” has topped the 4 million-viewer mark since late March.
The upbeat numbers came as Matt Gutman filled in for Dokoupil, who has struggle to keep the show’s ratings above 4 million in recent months,
“It’s a bad sign for Tony when your substitute anchor reels in over 100,000 more viewers than you,” a CBS source said, going on to speculate: “If this trend continues, [CBS News Editor-in-Chief] Bari Weiss will have to think about changing anchors.”
The source said that when Dokoupil returns to the chair, he’ll have to hit the ground running and keep viewership above 4 million — or else it’s a “clear indication” that the audience prefers Gutman –“even if it’s a small sample.”
A CBS News insider said all network newscasts had more viewers the week of July 27 when compared to the week of July 20.
Aside from the gain of 100,000 viewers for Gutman, he also beat Dokoupil in the advertiser-coveted demographic of 25- to 54-year-olds. For the week of July 27, Gutman pulled in 570,000 viewers in the demo versus Dokoupil’s 516,000 total, a week earlier.
What’s more, “CBS Evening News” has struggled to consistently hit over 4 million viewers since Weiss launched a major overhaul of the show earlier this year, which included installing Dokoupil.
While the anchor hit 4 million viewers during the week of June 22, he hasn’t exceeded that threshold since averaging 4.2 million viewers during the week of March 30, according to Status, which first reported the latest ratings.
One CBS staffer chalked Gutman’s ratings jump up to “the curse of Tony Dokoupil,” a saying inside the halls of the network that refers to a series of misfortunes that have befallen the new anchor.
Dokoupil has had a fair share of snafus since taking the helm on Jan. 5, starting off with a teleprompter failure. More recently, he anchored an ill-fated broadcast from Taiwan after the network failed to secure a visa to cover the US-China summit in Beijing in May.
During one of the broadcasts, the show’s cameraman suddenly collapsed from exhaustion, The Post first reported, giving rise to whispers that Dokoupil is “cursed.”
Last month, the show mistakenly aired an image of rapper Kanye West instead of Sean “Diddy” Combs in its report on President Trump mulling a pardon of Combs, as reported by The Post.
Dokoupil’s bad luck struck CBS’ July 4th special, as well. Dokoupil, who was co-anchoring the network’s three-hour special from the National Mall in Washington, DC, was among those evacuated due to incoming thunderstorms, putting a crimp in the network’s planned programming.
Sources at the time said the program looked like “amateur hour” and noted that the primetime show appeared to be scrubbed from CBS’ streaming service Paramount+, where it had been live-streamed, as well as from CBS.com.
CBS News did not return requests for comment.