CBS News finds itself in an embarrassing geopolitical bind this week after evening anchor Tony Dokoupil was forced to broadcast from Taipei instead of Beijing, having failed to secure a Chinese visa in time to cover President Trump’s high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping. The last-minute pivot has landed the network in a logistical and diplomatic mess, with insiders openly mocking the decision as one of the worst in modern broadcast history.
While NBC’s Lester Holt and ABC’s David Muir anchored their flagship programs from the Chinese capital — exactly where the action was unfolding — Dokoupil set up shop more than 1,000 miles away in Taiwan, a self-governing island Beijing considers part of its territory. The optics could hardly be worse for a network already battling a ratings collapse and internal turmoil.
A Last-Minute Scramble Across the Strait
According to reporting first published on May 13, 2026, CBS had originally planned for Dokoupil to anchor from Beijing alongside his network rivals. But on the Wednesday morning planning call, producers were forced to redirect the anchor to Taipei after his visa failed to come through. It remains unclear whether the holdup stemmed from a late application or an issue on the Chinese side.
The distance from Taipei to Beijing is 1,070 miles — roughly the same as flying from New York to Tampa. CBS attempted to obscure the geographic gaffe in its promotional materials, billing the broadcast vaguely as “CBS Evening News LIVE from the region” rather than identifying Dokoupil’s actual location.
The network is keeping correspondents Weijia Jiang and Anna Koren on the ground with President Trump during his three-day visit to China. A network source insisted that Dokoupil’s Taipei posting actually underscored the strategic importance of Taiwan, which was expected to feature prominently in summit discussions alongside pending U.S. arms sales, trade, and technology disputes. The Taiwan Relations Act, passed in 1979, commits Washington to supporting the island’s self-defense.
Insiders Call It a Diplomatic Disaster
Not everyone inside the network is buying the spin. One CBS source described the move as a “cover-your-ass” maneuver, while another offered a far more colorful assessment.
“This is possibly the dumbest decision in the history of broadcast news,” the source said, warning that “Beijing will be furious when he anchors from Taiwan which they claim as part of their territory.”
Another insider piled on, saying the planning failure “feels like there is no adult in charge” given that the trip had been announced months in advance. Critics inside and outside the network have argued that placing Dokoupil in Taipei is tantamount to waving a red flag at a bull where Chinese officials are concerned — a serious problem for a network whose parent company has business interests pending before the Trump administration.
Ratings in Free Fall
The visa fiasco lands at a particularly painful moment for CBS Evening News, which has been mired in third place since Dokoupil took over the storied broadcast in January 2026. Ratings data for the week of May 4 showed CBS averaging just 3.7 million total viewers and 473,000 in the coveted 25–54 demographic.
The numbers look brutal next to the competition. ABC World News Tonight pulled in 8.2 million total viewers and 976,000 in the key demo, while NBC Nightly News averaged 6.1 million total viewers and 903,000 in the demo. CBS isn’t just losing — it’s being lapped.
The slide has intensified scrutiny on editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who took over the news division in 2025 despite having no prior experience running a television operation, and managing editor Charles Forelle. Forelle defended the network’s editorial direction last week, telling staff: “We don’t think that we want to move 10 degrees to the right and find the center. We think that there’s a wider aperture of audience out there than other people think.”
A Pattern of Stumbles
Dokoupil’s tenure has been turbulent from the jump. His January debut was littered with gaffes, with the anchor stumbling repeatedly over the teleprompter and acknowledging on-air, “First day, big problems here.” It was later reported that Weiss herself had personally rewritten portions of the teleprompter script moments before air — an extraordinarily unusual intervention for an executive at her level.
That early debacle drew brutal reactions from CBS veterans, one of whom described the moment as a complete disaster and questioned the editorial judgment behind it. Staff frustration deepened after Dokoupil — whose wife, Katy Tur, anchors at MSNBC — publicly accused the “legacy media” of having “missed the story” by placing “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
The stakes extend well beyond a single botched broadcast. The Ellison family, which controls CBS’s parent company, is depending on President Trump’s blessing to complete its pending merger with WarnerMedia. A diplomatic flare-up with Beijing — triggered by a CBS anchor broadcasting from territory China claims as its own — is not the kind of headline corporate leadership wanted heading into the summit. For a network already battling humiliation on multiple fronts, the view from Taipei has rarely looked worse.