New CBS Evening News Anchors Promise News ‘In a Clean and Clear Way,’ Not ‘Bombarding’

January 27th, 2025 5:28 PM

Hours ahead of their debut as co-anchors for the revamped CBS Evening News, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois stopped by Monday’s CBS Mornings and CBS Mornings Plus to preview their outlook on what promises to be a different newscast that would cover fewer stories, but go more in depth on those they do highlight. The two promised to help viewers “understand” the news “in a clean and clear way” with “good, clean information” while “the world’s on fire.”

They added their newscast — which has spent decades in third-place — would be “illuminiat[ing]” as opposed to “agitating,” “bombarding,” “pelting,” and “poking at them” with “a firehose of news[.]” We’ll see if they hold themselves to doing this for all Americans and not turn into this.

On the main morning show, co-host Gayle King began with a clip from the first-ever CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963 as a segue to this “new era” with Dickerson and DuBois overseeing “a new look and format.”

Dickerson offered the normal platitudes about the supposedly illustrious history of CBS: “[I]t’s an enormous responsibility, but it’s one of the joys to wake up and do something. You — you guys know this: to wake up and try to hit the target. And what is the target? It’s the one that’s been set by everybody who’s worked at CBS and the people who work there now.”

 

 

Asked by co-host Tony Dokoupil about how CBS Evening News would address the “central problem of” in the news business with its both availability and being “harder to know what’s accurate,” Dickerson said the show would “take lots and lots of complicated stories, work them and work them and work them and talk to people and get reporting and make sure that when we deliver it, people understand it in a clean and clear way.”

“[T]he hope is that instead of bombarding and pelting people and poking at them and agitating them, we can say, here’s what we think is happening, here’s what we don’t know, and here are our correspondents on the ground and what they know and use our curiosity to try to illuminate as much as possible, so people feel the control that comes from having good, clean information,” he added.

 

 

DuBois shared what their thinking will be in using semi-co-anchors Margaret Brennan (for foreign policy and politics) and Lonnie Quinn (for weather): 

A lot of people feel like the world’s on fire. Things are beyond our control. You wonder, why is this happening? How does this affect me? And we get to people like Margaret and Lonnie, they can explain, you know, weather phenomenon, and they can explain political phenomenon around the world and so, at the end of the day, you want to feel like you have some control, you have some hope. You understand what is going on. That’s the hope every night.

Over on CBS Mornings Plus, the two shared how they met (by chance in the bathroom) and DuBois explained, as per co-host Tony Dokoupil, “your philosophy, your vision for approaching the news in this era because no one can get away from it” to the point “people are overwhelmed.”

“It feels like we are drinking from a firehose of news on a daily basis,” he began, adding “what we’re going to do is take a breath,” “relax,” and “be deliberate in our approach to it and we will probably do your stories but we’re going to get more in-depth about it, right?”

 

 

“We’re going to talk with our correspondents around the world, we’re going to get to the why is this happening and what does it mean to me? That can get lost in the avalanche of news that we’re beset by on a daily basis. And so, that’s our starting point and we hope you’ll join us to take us through to the end of that,” he concluded.

To see the relevant transcripts from January 27, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).