By Roger L Simon

Is there still “Evening News” on CBS—or do they call it something else?

I should know. I’m in their “demo.” I’m 82.

But I don’t know a single person, myself included, who watches the evening news on any of the networks, not one.

It’s a tired remnant of the Paleolithic Age of communications and should have been put to rest by the 1987 movie “Broadcast News”. And even then, it was well into its dotage.

I thought Bari Weiss—who was brought over to CBS to upgrade, maybe even revolutionize, their news division, and whose The Free Press has been a remarkable Substack success—would have ended this dinosaur, but instead we have this:

“CBS has found the next anchor of the CBS Evening News.

“The news division, which is set to be overhauled under newly-minted editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and president Tom Cibrowski, has named Tony Dokoupil anchor of the venerable evening newscast, which has counted Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Katie Couric among its alumni.”

The link is to the Hollywood Reporter, which is appropriate since the intention is to bring back eyeballs to something nobody really wants. You may not have heard of Dokoupil—I barely had—but it doesn’t matter. It won’t work with whoever is chosen.

According to The Independent, CBS staffers are considering the selection of Dokoupil “an insult.” Just who would they have selected?

The old “Evening News” concept, no matter how you slice it, is a return to promulgating the news ex cathedra, as if one could understand, or even begin to understand, the world by dutifully sitting down in front of a television at seven o’clock.

If you look at the names mentioned in the Reporter’s lede—Cronkite, Rather, and Couric—you are supposed to think these people were revered authorities in some way or other.

Cronkite indeed had immense power, far too much, probably, in an era when too many consumed news from a single source. Some say he deliberately misreported the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War—implying the US may have lost that battle when it had won—to get our country to withdraw from the war. I’m not sure of the veracity of that accusation, but Cronkite’s influence was outsized.

Rather was another matter. He was forced to step down from his role as CBS anchor in 2005 for lying about the Bush National Guard papers. He later left the network altogether. (The founding of Pajamas Media, later Pj Media, with which I was involved, was an outgrowth of that scandal.)

As for Katie Couric, she wants us to believe, as a seasoned reporter and anchor at that point, that she was “unaware” of Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 conviction for prostitution-related charges when she attended a 2010 party at his manse along with Prince Andrew, Chelsea Handler, Woody Allen, and George Stephanopoulos.

The list of CBS anchors is not exactly august.

The new version of the CBS Evening News may be popular for a few weeks as a curiosity, but it’s not hard to predict that it will fizzle after that. Let’s hope Bari Weiss has something more original up her sleeve for the network.

For now, this all makes me think of this famous song from my generation. These days it sounds more prescient than ever.

First published in American Refugees