CBS Evening News
The CBS Evening News is the flagship evening television news program of CBS News, the news division of the CBS television network in the United States. The CBS Evening News is a daily evening broadcast featuring news reports, feature stories and interviews by CBS News correspondents and reporters covering events around the world. Since 2025, the program has had more of a news magazine-styled format, with a larger focus on long-form stories. The program has been broadcast since July1, 1941, under the original title CBS Television News, eventually adopting its existing title in 1963.
Since January3, 2026, the flagship nightly broadcast has been anchored by Tony Dokoupil from the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City. Previous weeknight anchors have included Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Connie Chung, Bob Schieffer, Russ Mitchell, Katie Couric, Harry Smith, Scott Pelley, Anthony Mason, Jeff Glor, Norah O'Donnell, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
Saturday and Sunday broadcasts of the CBS Evening News began in February 1966. On May2, 2016, CBS announced that the weekend edition would be rebranded, effective May7, 2016, as the CBS Weekend News. Weekend newscasts originate from the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City, and are anchored by Jericka Duncan. From 2016 to 2020, the CBS Weekend News was anchored by Reena Ninan on Saturday and Elaine Quijano on Sunday. By the summer of 2020, Ninan and Quijano were replaced by Major Garrett and Jamie Yuccas. In December 2020, Adriana Diaz and Jericka Duncan were announced to be the new weekend anchors; Diaz left the program in 2024.
The weeknight edition of the CBS Evening News airs live at 6:30 pm in the Eastern Time Zone and 5:30 pm in the Central Time Zone, and is tape delayed for the Mountain Time Zone. A "Western Edition", with updated segments covering breaking news stories, airs previously recorded at 6:30 pm for most stations in the Pacific Time Zone and 5:30 pm in the Alaska Time Zone and on tape delay in the Hawaii–Aleutian Time Zone. At midnight Eastern, the Western Edition is posted on the website for CBS News and their YouTube channel. The Western Edition additionally airs along with the weekend versions on CBS News 24/7.
As of April11, 2024, CBS Evening News remains in third place of the three major television news programs, with around 4,969,000 total viewers.
History
Early years (1941–1948)
Upon becoming commercial a station on July 1, 1941, WCBW, the pioneer CBS television station in New York City, broadcast two daily news programs, at 2:30 and 8:00 pm weekdays, both anchored by Richard Hubbell. Most of the newscasts featured Hubbell reading a script with only occasional cutaways to a map or still photograph. When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, WCBW, took to the air at 8:45 pm with an extensive special report. The national emergency broke down the unspoken wall between CBS radio and television. WCBW executives convinced radio announcers and experts such as George Fielding Elliot and Linton Wells to come to the CBS television studios at Grand Central Station from the radio network base at 485 Madison Avenue, to give information and commentary on the attack. The WCBW special report that night lasted less than 90 minutes, but it pushed the limits of live television in 1941 and opened up new possibilities for future broadcasts. As CBS wrote in a special report to the FCC, the unscheduled live news broadcast on December 7 "was unquestionably the most stimulating challenge and marked the greatest advance of any single problem faced up to that time."Additional newscasts were scheduled in the early days of World War II, including War Backgrounds, World This Week, and America At War. In May 1942, WCBW temporarily suspended studio operations, which resulted in the station sharply cutting back its live program schedule, and resorting exclusively to the occasional broadcast of films. This was primarily because many of the staff had either joined the military service or were redeployed to war-related technical research, and to prolong the life of the early, unstable cameras, which were impossible to repair due to the wartime lack of parts.
In May 1944, as the war began to turn in favor of the Allies, WCBW reopened the studios and the newscasts returned, briefly anchored by Ned Calmer, followed by Alan Jackson, Everett Holles, and Dwight Cooke. After the war, expanded news programs appeared on the WCBW schedule. The station's call letters were changed to WCBS-TV in 1946. Anchors included Bob McKee, Milo Boulton, Jim McMullin, Larry LeSueur, Tom O’Connor, and beginning in 1947, Douglas Edwards.
Douglas Edwards (1948–1962)
On May 3, 1948, Douglas Edwards began anchoring CBS Television News, as a regular 15-minute nightly newscast on the CBS television network, including WCBS-TV. It aired every weeknight at 7:30 pm, and was the first regularly scheduled, network television news program featuring an anchor. NBC's offering at the time, NBC Television Newsreel, which premiered in February 1948, was simply film footage with voice narration.The network also broadcast a recap of the week's news stories on a Sunday night program titled Newsweek in Review, which was later moved to Saturday and retitled The Week in Review. In 1950, the nightly newscast was renamed Douglas Edwards with the News, and in September the following year, it became the first news program to be broadcast simultaneously on the East Coast and West Coast through the installation of a new coaxial cable connection. That transcontinental link prompted Edwards to start each broadcast with the updated greeting "Good evening everyone, coast to coast."
On November 30, 1956, the program became the first to use the new technology of videotape to time delay the broadcast for the Western United States.
Walter Cronkite (1962–1981)
On April 16, 1962, veteran CBS journalist Walter Cronkite succeeded Edwards, and the broadcast was retitled Walter Cronkite with the News. On September 2, 1963, the newscast, retitled CBS Evening News, became the very first 30-minute weeknight news broadcast on network television, moving to 6:30 pm Eastern time. As before, some affiliates had the option of carrying a later edition, scheduled at 7:00 pm Eastern.The CBS Evening News was first transmitted in color as a one-evening test broadcast on August 19, 1965, before permanently switching to the format on January 31, 1966. On February 5, 1966, the first Saturday edition of the Evening News debuted, anchored by Roger Mudd.
Under Cronkite, the newscast began what eventually became an 18-year period of dominating the ratings among the network evening news programs. In the process, Cronkite became "the most trusted man in America" according to a Gallup Poll, a status that had first been fostered in November 1963 through his coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In February 1968, Cronkite, who was well-regarded for his work as a war correspondent during World War II, made a special trip to South Vietnam to report on the Tet Offensive, which was then under way. His prime time special report, titled Who, What, When, Where, Why, which was broadcast after he returned, on February 27, 1968, ended with Cronkite declaring that the United States could only hope for a "stalemate" in the Vietnam War. It is often credited with influencing President Lyndon Johnson's decision to drop out of the 1968 United States presidential election. "If I've lost Walter Cronkite... 've lost Middle America," he reportedly stated.
In late 1972, Cronkite prodded the show's producers to feature two nights of in-depth coverage on the unfolding Watergate scandal, which had been reported on extensively by The Washington Post, but had not received major national coverage on television. After the first part of this reportage, shown on a Friday, ran for 14 minutes, Nixon Administration officials complained to CBS founder William S. Paley. The second half of the report was aired the following Monday, but only for eight minutes.
Dan Rather (1981–2005)
1981–1993
Cronkite was replaced as anchor of the program the Monday after his retirement, March 9, 1981, by 49-year-old Dan Rather, who had been with CBS News as a correspondent since the early 1960s, and later became a correspondent for the network's news magazine, 60 Minutes. Concerns about excessive liberalism in the media were frequently leveled at Rather, the CBS Evening News, CBS News, and CBS in general. Some of these concerns dated from Rather's position as White House correspondent for the network's news division during the Nixon administration. A shouting match with Vice President George H. W. Bush during an interview on live television in January 1988 related to the Iran–Contra affair did little to dispel those concerns. Rather unapologetically defended his behavior in statements the following day, and Bush went on to win the presidential election in November.Earlier, on September 1, 1986, amid a brewing battle among CBS's board of directors for control of the company and turmoil at CBS News, Rather closed his Monday broadcast with the word "courage", and repeating it the following night. On September 3, Rather said the masculine noun for the Spanish word for "courage", coraje. In the face of media attention and pleas from his staff, Rather abandoned the signoff on September 8.
On September 11, 1987, Rather marched off camera in anger just before a remote broadcast of the program when it appeared that CBS Sports' coverage of a U.S. Open tennis semifinal match between Steffi Graf and Lori McNeil was going to run over into time allotted for the newscast. Rather was in Miami covering the visit to the city by Pope John Paul II. When the tennis match ended sooner than expected at 6:32 pm Eastern, Rather was nowhere to be found, and six minutes of dead air followed before he returned to the broadcast position; nearly half of the audience watched and waited. Rather attempted to explain his actions with a statement release on Sunday, but made no mention of it on his next newscast on Monday, delayed by the men's final. By 1990, the CBS Evening News had fallen to third place in the ratings, behind ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.
On January 22, 1991, demonstrators from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power broke into the CBS News studio and chanted "Fight AIDS, not Arabs" during the show's introduction. One protester was seen on camera just as Rather began speaking. Rather immediately called for a commercial break, but the screen went black instead for six seconds before returning to Rather. He apologized twice to viewers about the incident.