CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has reportedly been unable to obtain a visa to travel to China and will be covering President Donald Trump’s state visit from over 1,000 miles away.
Dokoupil will instead broadcast the CBS Evening News from Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, this week as Trump is set to take part in high-stakes talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
Semafor reports, citing two unnamed sources, that Dokoupil failed to get a Chinese visa in time for the trip. It’s unclear what the exact issue was with the visa.
This is just the latest misstep for CBS News under the leadership of Bari Weiss, and it comes as Dokoupil’s show is pulling weak ratings compared to his broadcasting counterparts.
CBS Evening News trailed behind ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC’s Nightly News in the week of April 27 with and average of 3.86 million viewers, AdWeek reported Friday, citing Nielsen Media Research data.
World News Tonight, hosted by David Muir, came out on top with about 8.3 million viewers, and Nightly News with Tom Llamas brought in an average 6.23 million viewers.
Muir and Llamas are both broadcasting from Beijing this week, Semafor first reported.
CBS News announced Dokoupil’s anticipated broadcast from Taipei in a press release, noting that it will be the first time the evening news program has been anchored from Taiwan in its 63-year history.
“The democratic state is at the center of the high stakes talks as China's geopolitical tensions with Taiwan run high,” the release read. “Dokoupil reports on what's at stake and why it matters for Americans.”
Semafor first reported on CBS News broadcasting its evening program from Taiwan.
CBS News will still have Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang and Foreign Correspondent Anna Coren reporting from Beijing.
Weiss, who founded the so-called anti-woke media outlet The Free Press, took over as the network’s editor-in-chief last October, and Dokoupil replaced evening news co-anchors Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson soon after in a heavily criticized overhaul.
One network staffer told The Independent Dokoupil had turned CBS Evening News into “state TV.”
President Donald Trump told Dokoupil on the program in January that he “wouldn't have a job right now” if former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris won the 2024 presidential election.
Weiss is also shaking up CBS News’ long-running 60 Minutes show, with Dokoupil and other journalists at the network expected to make appearances next season, according to the New York Post.
Trump arrived in Beijing Wednesday with tech billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook. The president and Xi are scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting, where they are expected to discuss the Iran war, trade relations and the future of Taiwan.
