Overview
- Status, after reviewing Nielsen data, reported that Matt Gutman averaged 4.1 million viewers in his first week filling in, the broadcast’s best weekly audience in 17 weeks.
- Tony Dokoupil was on a two-week summer vacation in late July and is reported to be scheduled to return to the anchor desk on Monday.
- People inside the CBS newsroom described Gutman as likable and personable during his fill-in week, and an unnamed veteran television executive called Dokoupil’s choice to take two weeks off during a slump 'baffling.'
- The Evening News has largely failed to clear a roughly 4 million-viewer threshold since Bari Weiss reorganized the broadcast earlier this year, a benchmark executives once called the minimum acceptable audience.
- The short-term uptick has renewed internal and industry scrutiny of anchor effectiveness and Weiss-era strategy and could influence CBS’s staffing and programming decisions in the weeks ahead.