Cbs News will send Tony Dokoupil to Taipei instead of Beijing after he failed to get his Chinese visa in time to cover President Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping. The network changed plans at the last minute and said Dokoupil is ready to anchor “CBS Evening News LIVE from the region.”
The move leaves him about 1,070 miles from the center of the story while NBC News’s Tom Llamas and ABC News’s David Muir anchor from Beijing. Two CBS correspondents are still traveling with Trump in China, but the network’s own top evening anchor will be broadcasting from Taiwan, a decision one source described as a “cover your a--” move.
The trip comes at a delicate moment for CBS News, which has been trying to stabilize its evening broadcast under Bari Weiss, who took over last year in an effort to make the network more Trump-friendly. Dokoupil’s own start at the anchor desk was rocky. His debut broadcast in January included gaffes and repeated teleprompter stumbles, and he told viewers, “First day, big problems here.”
That history matters because the network is already under pressure from the numbers. The week of May 4, Dokoupil averaged 3.7 million total viewers and 473,000 average viewers in the 25-54 demo. ABC World News Tonight averaged 8.2 million total viewers and 976,000 in the key demo for the same week, while NBC Nightly News averaged 6.1 million total viewers and 903,000.
The visa problem is also not fully explained. It remains unclear whether Dokoupil’s issues were caused by a late application or something else, and the network has not said publicly why the plan came together so late. What is clear is that CBS News had prepared for him to cover Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping, then moved him to Taiwan at the last minute when the visa did not come through.
That is the tension running through the story: the network wants the authority of a major foreign assignment, but the execution has already handed critics an easy opening. One CBS source called the decision “possibly the dumbest decision in the history of broadcast news,” while another said Beijing would be furious because Taiwan is claimed by China as part of its territory. The same source said putting Dokoupil in Taiwan was “not only stupid” but “a red rag to a bull” and added, “Very sloppy. This trip was announced months in advance. It feels like there is no adult in charge.”
For now, the closest answer to the question is that CBS News is still getting the story on the air, but not from the city that would have made the broadcast look like a clean win. Dokoupil will be live from Taipei, the rivals will be in Beijing, and the network will have to explain why one of the biggest assignments of the week ended up a continent away from the meeting that was supposed to define it.
