CBS Evening News lost ground again in the audience advertisers watch most closely. For the week of July 6, the broadcast averaged 3.788 million total viewers and 497,000 viewers in Adults 25–54, a 1 percent gain in total viewers but a 1 percent loss in the demo week over week.
That matters because CBS Evening News was the only evening news program on broadcast TV to lose 25-to-54-year-old viewers from the prior week. It also remained in last place, while ABC World News Tonight averaged 8.291 million total viewers and 1.058 million demo viewers and NBC Nightly News averaged 6.380 million total viewers and 935,000 demo viewers. Both of those broadcasts posted gains week over week, with ABC up 2 percent in total viewers and 10 percent in the demo, and NBC up 4 percent in total viewers and 9 percent in the demo.
The weekly numbers are the latest check on Tony Dokoupil’s run at the anchor desk after a rocky start in January. His tenure opened with a series of bumps that drew attention beyond the newscast itself, including a controversial effort to distance the program from legacy media and expert commentary, a polarizing interview with Pete Hegseth, on-air mix-ups, a widely criticized take on the January 6 Capital riots and a legal threat from the White House. In a news cycle already marked by negative press for CBS News under Bari Weiss and David Ellison, the ratings offer a simple answer to the question of whether the program has stabilized: not yet.
The split between total viewers and the advertiser-friendly demo is the more troubling part of the picture. CBS Evening News was up 1 percent in total viewers week over week, but the gain did not carry into Adults 25–54, and the broadcast was also the only one of the three to lose viewers year over year. It was down 2 percent in total viewers from a year earlier and down 1 percent in the demo, a reminder that a small improvement in the broad audience is not enough to offset softness where ad buyers pay the most attention.
Alicia Hastey, who quit as a CBS Evening News producer, said CBS News stories may instead be judged not only on journalistic merit but on whether they fit a shifting set of ideological expectations that can pressure producers and reporters to avoid backlash. That concern hangs over a newscast that is trying to build an audience while carrying the baggage of January and a wider cloud over CBS News. For now, the latest Nielsen week shows CBS Evening News still searching for traction in the place that matters most: the viewers it is losing, not the viewers it is adding.
