Tony Dokoupil will broadcast from Taipei this week after CBS News changed course at the last minute and moved its plans away from Beijing. The shift surfaced Wednesday during the network’s morning planning call, where executives discussed sending Dokoupil to the Taiwanese capital instead of the Chinese one.
Two people briefed on the matter said Dokoupil had not been able to get a Chinese visa in time. CBS News declined to comment, and the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to questions about why he is not in Beijing. The move leaves the network’s coverage of a tightly watched trip to China with a different map than the one it had expected to use at the start of the week.
The change matters because American broadcasters are planning extensive coverage from the Chinese capital this week, and CBS had been preparing to join that push from Beijing. A person at the network said CBS has two correspondents traveling with President Donald Trump in China, and that Dokoupil’s presence in Taipei underscored Taiwan’s importance. That choice also fits the network’s broader effort to keep pace with competitors while its own evening news operation remains in third place and continues to see its ratings slide.
On Sunday, Semafor first reported that NBC News’s Tom Llamas would be anchoring from Beijing, as would ABC News’s David Muir. By Wednesday, CBS had shifted its own plan toward Taipei, a move that separates it from the other major broadcasters heading into the same news cycle. The contrast is striking: while others are lining up in the Chinese capital, CBS is sending one of its prominent anchors to Taiwan instead.
That pivot also comes as CBS News’s strategy has been shaped by the political and business interests of the Ellison family, and as critics have focused on editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her team lacking experience in running a television network. Charles Forelle, speaking about the network’s approach, said, “We don’t think that we want to move 10 degrees to the right and find the center. We think that there’s a wider aperture of audience out there than other people think.” For now, the immediate answer to the network’s latest cbs news medical emergency-style scramble is simple: Dokoupil will be on the air from Taipei this week, not Beijing, because the visa never came through in time.
