Tony Dokoupil Cbs
tur hubby?
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CBS axed its last climate reporting pillar
CBS’ climate coverage was already shifting toward misleading framing before the network reportedly cut its last dedicated climate reporter
Special ProgramsClimate & Energy
Written by Evlondo Cooper
Published 04/03/26
CBS News is laying off national environmental correspondent David Schechter, reportedly leaving no one at the network dedicated to covering climate change. That means that when CBS does cover the issue, the reporting will be more likely to omit scientific context and elevate misleading or contrarian framing, a shift already visible in the network's limited coverage so far in 2026.
Schechter’s departure is part of a broader round of cuts and restructuring
CBS is reportedly eliminating its last dedicated climate reporter as part of a wider round of layoffs affecting approximately 6% of staff. The cuts also include correspondents across the newsroom and the shutdown of CBS News Radio, ending the network’s radio service after almost 100 years on air.
CBS also cut another correspondent, Dave Malkoff, a national correspondent whose work included climate and environmental reporting across the network’s platforms.
The layoffs come as CBS News struggles with declining ratings and a shrinking audience. In the first quarter of 2026, it was reported that CBS Evening News was on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century, while CBS Mornings is also heading toward record lows, even as competitors ABC and NBC grew during that period.
The changes to CBS’ climate coverage began in October 2025, when the network dismissed most of its dedicated climate team as part of a broader newsroom overhaul. Producers were reassigned or let go. What had been a sustained reporting effort was reduced to one dedicated climate correspondent and a handful of reporters who occasionally covered climate among their other beats. By this spring, the structure that supported climate reporting at CBS was already gone, and Schechter was left covering the beat in a newsroom no longer set up to support the work.
Dedicated climate reporting at CBS connected science, policy, and real-world impacts – and its degradation is already showing up in coverage
David Schechter was part of a group of CBS correspondents who regularly covered climate, helping integrate the issue into national reporting rather than treating it as an isolated topic. That work did not happen in a vacuum. It was supported by producers and internal coordination that helped reporters connect extreme weather, public health, and economic impacts back to climate change and the policies shaping it.
Schechter was not just covering climate as an abstract issue. He was reporting on how it was affecting people in real time and who was being left exposed.
During the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning, Schechter examined heat-related disparities, interviewing Ken Rye, whose mother died in her apartment during a heat wave after her building failed to turn on the air conditioning. Schechter connected rising temperatures to inequality, public health, and climate justice.
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From the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning
During the August 8, 2024, episode of CBS Evening News, he reported on the link between climate-driven heat and labor conditions, federal policy, and worker safety.
These segments showed what climate reporting looks like when someone is responsible for following the story, incorporating scientific context, connecting the issue to policy, and highlighting the communities most affected by climate change.
After October, the shift was immediate. CBS aired just 7 climate segments between Weiss’ takeover in October and the end of the year, a sharp drop from earlier in 2025.
When climate reporting did appear on CBS, it looked different.
During a January segment on CBS Evening News, the network highlighted the surprising health of polar bears despite melting sea ice, elevating an outlier narrative long used by climate skeptics. Not only did the segment not situate its findings within the overwhelming consensus on climate change, but anchor Tony Dokoupil also concluded by telling viewers that “experts have been wrong before,” reinforcing a line commonly used to cast doubt on established climate science.
A December segment on youth climate anxiety followed a similar pattern. Instead of examining the material impacts driving youth concerns, the segment reframed climate coverage around personal decision-making and cultural debate, echoing narratives that downplay risk and shift attention away from systemic causes of global warming.
This is what happens when no one is dedicated to the beat.
There was no one consistently responsible for bringing scientific context into the story. No one to connect individual events to broader climate trends. No one to challenge weak sourcing or misleading framing before it reaches viewers.
That was the state of CBS’ climate coverage before Schechter was laid off. His departure makes it clear that CBS is no longer willing to even pretend climate is worth covering in a way that reflects the science, the stakes, or the people most affected.
MMA
:{03/04/26
:{01/13/26
- ### How climate correspondents are driving improvements in corporate broadcast news' climate coverage
03/29/23
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an gone a bit? 2 26
Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”
Whoseideological expectations was Hastey referring to? Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office?
Hastey’s criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-“woke” opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief at CBS News, unveiled her “21st century” vision at a town hall meeting.
Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn’t like it. Since then, at least six out of 20 “CBS Evening News” producers have accepted buyouts.
At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. In the latest tranche of Epstein files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including in an email in which he tells Epstein that “p----- is, indeed, low carb.”
In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “We love America” should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the “CBS Evening News.”
Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced “Evening News” anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.
In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel’s justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that “Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas.”
Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a “60 Minutes” report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison hours before it was set to air.
Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, had accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
The segment later aired on January 18, drawing over 5 million viewers.
The story CBS posted about Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis reported that “the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”
No identifiable source was given for CBS’s assertion of “internal bleeding.” A CBS News staffer reported “huge internal concern” that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked.
Weiss doesn’t exactly report to Donald Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely understood threat that he’ll wreak havoc if it doesn’t do what he wants.
As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.” HUH?
Perhaps CBS News didn’t edit Dokoupil’s rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your a-- off.”
You see the way Trump now controls CBS News. Dokoupil is Bari Weiss’s newly minted anchor. Bari Weiss is David Ellison’s newly minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father’s (Larry Ellison) newly minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump’s who contributes to Trump’s super PAC. And Trump? He allowed Ellison to buy CBS and now has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison as well.
Among David Ellison’s first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and appoint Weiss.
I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS’s investors.
America can survive without a “60 Minutes” it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of The Washington Post — whose owner, Jeff Bezos, has demanded it reflect right-wing capitalism and whose newsroom he just gutted.
But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.
Here, in contrast to the Trump suck-up CBS News has become, is
, from April 13, 1954.
:{*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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