A veteran producer at “CBS Evening News With Tony Dokoupil” was fired this week after raising concerns over the editorial direction of the program.
Javier Guzman, who has been with CBS News since 2017, was dismissed Wednesday from his position as senior producer, according to people familiar with the action who were not authorized to comment. A CBS News representative said the company does not discuss personnel matters.
Guzman is said to have expressed disagreement over the editorial direction of the evening newscast, which has undergone a revamp under CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss. Guzman did not respond to a request for comment.
The sudden exit on the third day of Dokoupil’s tenure added to a growing perception that the program is off to an inauspicious start. Media industry newsletters and the tabloids have become repositories for unattributed comments from CBS News insiders who are unhappy with the changes.
The latest iteration of the storied newscast has generated negative feedback on social media for its content. On Tuesday, that included a breezy salute to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a series of memes. It was a questionable choice coming days after a deadly U.S. military attack on Venezuela, where special forces captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The same episode was also blasted for a brief item noting the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The view of the historic event from five years ago was presented as a difference of opinion between President Trump and Democratic leaders in Congress.
The segments advanced the narrative among many media critics that Weiss is chasing after MAGA-friendly viewers and looking to please the White House as parent company Paramount pursues the takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. She joined the network in October after Paramount acquired her digital news site the Free Press, which often decries the excesses of the political left.
On Wednesday, the day after Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman was shot in her vehicle by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, “CBS Evening News” went ahead with a planned trip to Dallas as part of a multicity tour to promote Dokoupil as the new anchor.
While Dokoupil has said he wants “CBS Evening News” to focus more on the viewpoints of regular citizens and less on “elites” based in New York and Washington, his Dallas visit included a helicopter ride with Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys. There was also a brief segment on the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
Dokoupil did score a newsworthy interview that day with ICE chief Tom Homan, who notably held back on commenting on the fatal shooting of Good while Trump and other administration officials rushed to call her a domestic terrorist. The program also quickly pivoted by flying to Minneapolis, where it focused heavily on the reaction of shaken Minneapolis residents and anti-ICE protesters to the incident.
Ratings for Dokoupil’s broadcast are slightly above the season-to-date average, according to Nielsen, but remain well behind “ABC World News Tonight With David Muir” and “NBC Nightly News With Tom Llamas.”
Dokoupil was co-host of “CBS Mornings” before joining “CBS Evening News,” where he replaced the anchor duo of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
The crumbling cliff edge is just metres away. An automatic blind, which I can operate without getting out of bed, rises to reveal an ocean view: the dramatic storm-surging North Sea with great black-backed gulls circling nearby and a distant ship on the horizon. A watery gold sunrise lights the clouds and turbulent grey water.
I’m the first person to sleep in the new Kraken lodge at Still Southwold, a former farm in Easton Bavents on the Suffolk coast. It’s a stylish wooden cabin, one of a scattering of holiday lets in an area prone to aggressive coastal erosion. The owner, Anne Jones, describes the challenges of living on a coast that is rapidly receding in the face of climate-exacerbated storms: the waves have eroded more than 40 hectares (100 acres), and the family business “is no longer a viable farm”. Instead, it is home to low-carbon cottages and cabins, “designed to be movable when the land they stand on is lost to the sea”. The latest projects include a sea-view sauna and a ‘dune hut’ on the beach for reflexology treatments “with the sea and waves as the backdrop”.
By train, bus and on foot, I’m here for the beaches, marshes, heathland and villages. Arriving at sunset, Still Southwold feels wild and remote, with lapwings flapping through the twilight like huge bats, but Southwold pier is just an easy 10-minute walk away. Heading to the bus stop next morning, I notice plumes of spray behind the beach huts. Waves are crashing over the concrete promenade near the pier. There’s a contrast between the brightly painted row of huts, with their candy stripes and stained-glass dolphins, and the heaving, uncontainable ocean behind them. It’s a worrying sign, as the path I’ve chosen today is only walkable at low tide. Erosion means the official coast path between Lowestoft and Southwold has been mostly rerouted inland and the soft cliff edges are perilous.
Kraken cabin at Still Southwold. Photograph: Big Fish Photography/Still Southwold
A 20-minute bus ride from the end of Pier Avenue brings me to Kessingland, a village just south of Lowestoft. Heading for the coast, with supplies from Bushells Bakery, I soon reach Rider Haggard Lane. The author of King Solomon’s Mines, H Rider Haggard,spent several summers in a holiday home on the cliffs in Kessingland, where he was visited by his friend Rudyard Kipling. Haggard planted marram grass to stop the sea encroaching and, climbing down steps on to the beach, I find there’s still a wide marram-grass-covered band of shingle. The sandy cliffs include layers of clay and fossil traces of steppe mammoths, hippos and sabre-toothed cats.
At the far end of the beach, near flood management works, a Natural England sign warns that the beach-walking route from here to Southwold is impassable near Easton Bavents. The owners of Still Southwold give visitors a code for a gate between their clifftop farm and Covehithe Beach. I press on, looking warily at the mess of washed-up kelp and driftwood that winter waves have hurled on to the land.
A hardy hiker is heading the other way in shorts, with a battered rucksack. He’s one of only three people I meet all day, and I check the state of the beach ahead. Is it safe? Is it walkable? “There’s a storm surge,” says the hiker. “The tide’s been much higher than expected. The wind’s from the north and the North Sea’s wider at the top than the bottom – it’s like someone blowing on a teacup.” The image stays with me all day, intensified by the milky-brown colour of the water, as the giant-tea-cooling waves roll into the sandy shore.
Benacre broad. Photograph: Matthew Murphy/Alamy
Benacre Broad is unexpectedly lovely. A loop of woods and marshes surrounds a beautiful and fragile lake, cut off from the sea by a shifting bank of sand and shingle, decked with salt-bleached roots and tree trunks like a natural sculpture garden. The coast here has retreated more than 500 metres in the last couple of centuries, and salt water now often breaches the bird-rich lake. I eat my sandwich in the sheltered bird hide, listening for resident warblers in the reeds, but hear only the roar of the sea.
The atmospheric ruins of a huge medieval church stand on the cliffs above Benacre. St Andrew’s, Covehithe is now just the tall 14th-century tower and a smaller thatched building, under decaying arches, with the old octagonal carved font inside. At the end of the lane from church to coast, a red warning sign says “Footpath Closed” where the old coastal path ends abruptly on the collapsed cliff edge.
Later, the warm bar of the Swan in Southwold is extra welcome after a chilly day on windswept beaches. There’s port-laced mulled wine on offer, as well as creamy Baron Bigod brie from the Fen Farm Dairy or slow-cooked Blythburgh pork with apple.
Next day, I meet friends in the scone-scented Bloom cafe on Southwold High Street and we stroll across Southwold Common to Walberswick. We’re following a section of the nightjar waymarks of the Sandlings Walk, a long-distance hike through surviving fragments of heathland between Southwold and Ipswich. Since medieval times, 90% of what was once a continuous stretch of Suffolk heath has been lost.
The ferry across the Blyth. Photograph: Alamy
The last autumn colours are glowing across Walberswick Common, with its bracken and birch trees. We head back along boardwalks by the Dunwich River, remembering the drowned town of Dunwich not far away under the waves, a kind of Suffolk Atlantis. The wind has dropped today and the marsh is full of noises: the sudden trilling of a Cetti’s warbler and the rare song of a bearded tit from the miles of whispering reedbeds. We cross the Blyth estuary by rowing boat ferry for lunch at the harbourside Sole Bay Fish Company, before heading back towards Southwold as the sun sets.
Accommodation was provided by Still Southwold (cabins from £617 for three nights) and transport by Greater Anglia (singles from Norwich to Lowestoft £10.10, advance singles from London to Lowestoft from £17).
‘CBS Evening News’ producer fired amid turbulent relaunch
A veteran producer at “CBS Evening News With Tony Dokoupil” was fired this week after raising concerns over the editorial direction of the program.
Javier Guzman, who has been with CBS News since 2017, was dismissed Wednesday from his position as senior producer, according to people familiar with the action who were not authorized to comment. A CBS News representative said the company does not discuss personnel matters.
Guzman is said to have expressed disagreement over the editorial direction of the evening newscast, which has undergone a revamp under CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss. Guzman did not respond to a request for comment.
The sudden exit on the third day of Dokoupil’s tenure added to a growing perception that the program is off to an inauspicious start. Media industry newsletters and the tabloids have become repositories for unattributed comments from CBS News insiders who are unhappy with the changes.
The latest iteration of the storied newscast has generated negative feedback on social media for its content. On Tuesday, that included a breezy salute to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a series of memes. It was a questionable choice coming days after a deadly U.S. military attack on Venezuela, where special forces captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The same episode was also blasted for a brief item noting the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The view of the historic event from five years ago was presented as a difference of opinion between President Trump and Democratic leaders in Congress.
The segments advanced the narrative among many media critics that Weiss is chasing after MAGA-friendly viewers and looking to please the White House as parent company Paramount pursues the takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. She joined the network in October after Paramount acquired her digital news site the Free Press, which often decries the excesses of the political left.
On Wednesday, the day after Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman was shot in her vehicle by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, “CBS Evening News” went ahead with a planned trip to Dallas as part of a multicity tour to promote Dokoupil as the new anchor.
While Dokoupil has said he wants “CBS Evening News” to focus more on the viewpoints of regular citizens and less on “elites” based in New York and Washington, his Dallas visit included a helicopter ride with Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys. There was also a brief segment on the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
Dokoupil did score a newsworthy interview that day with ICE chief Tom Homan, who notably held back on commenting on the fatal shooting of Good while Trump and other administration officials rushed to call her a domestic terrorist. The program also quickly pivoted by flying to Minneapolis, where it focused heavily on the reaction of shaken Minneapolis residents and anti-ICE protesters to the incident.
Ratings for Dokoupil’s broadcast are slightly above the season-to-date average, according to Nielsen, but remain well behind “ABC World News Tonight With David Muir” and “NBC Nightly News With Tom Llamas.”
Dokoupil was co-host of “CBS Mornings” before joining “CBS Evening News,” where he replaced the anchor duo of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
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‘A watery gold sunrise lights the turbulent water’: the wild beauty of the Suffolk coast | Suffolk holidays
The crumbling cliff edge is just metres away. An automatic blind, which I can operate without getting out of bed, rises to reveal an ocean view: the dramatic storm-surging North Sea with great black-backed gulls circling nearby and a distant ship on the horizon. A watery gold sunrise lights the clouds and turbulent grey water.
I’m the first person to sleep in the new Kraken lodge at Still Southwold, a former farm in Easton Bavents on the Suffolk coast. It’s a stylish wooden cabin, one of a scattering of holiday lets in an area prone to aggressive coastal erosion. The owner, Anne Jones, describes the challenges of living on a coast that is rapidly receding in the face of climate-exacerbated storms: the waves have eroded more than 40 hectares (100 acres), and the family business “is no longer a viable farm”. Instead, it is home to low-carbon cottages and cabins, “designed to be movable when the land they stand on is lost to the sea”. The latest projects include a sea-view sauna and a ‘dune hut’ on the beach for reflexology treatments “with the sea and waves as the backdrop”.
By train, bus and on foot, I’m here for the beaches, marshes, heathland and villages. Arriving at sunset, Still Southwold feels wild and remote, with lapwings flapping through the twilight like huge bats, but Southwold pier is just an easy 10-minute walk away. Heading to the bus stop next morning, I notice plumes of spray behind the beach huts. Waves are crashing over the concrete promenade near the pier. There’s a contrast between the brightly painted row of huts, with their candy stripes and stained-glass dolphins, and the heaving, uncontainable ocean behind them. It’s a worrying sign, as the path I’ve chosen today is only walkable at low tide. Erosion means the official coast path between Lowestoft and Southwold has been mostly rerouted inland and the soft cliff edges are perilous.
A 20-minute bus ride from the end of Pier Avenue brings me to Kessingland, a village just south of Lowestoft. Heading for the coast, with supplies from Bushells Bakery, I soon reach Rider Haggard Lane. The author of King Solomon’s Mines, H Rider Haggard, spent several summers in a holiday home on the cliffs in Kessingland, where he was visited by his friend Rudyard Kipling. Haggard planted marram grass to stop the sea encroaching and, climbing down steps on to the beach, I find there’s still a wide marram-grass-covered band of shingle. The sandy cliffs include layers of clay and fossil traces of steppe mammoths, hippos and sabre-toothed cats.
At the far end of the beach, near flood management works, a Natural England sign warns that the beach-walking route from here to Southwold is impassable near Easton Bavents. The owners of Still Southwold give visitors a code for a gate between their clifftop farm and Covehithe Beach. I press on, looking warily at the mess of washed-up kelp and driftwood that winter waves have hurled on to the land.
A hardy hiker is heading the other way in shorts, with a battered rucksack. He’s one of only three people I meet all day, and I check the state of the beach ahead. Is it safe? Is it walkable? “There’s a storm surge,” says the hiker. “The tide’s been much higher than expected. The wind’s from the north and the North Sea’s wider at the top than the bottom – it’s like someone blowing on a teacup.” The image stays with me all day, intensified by the milky-brown colour of the water, as the giant-tea-cooling waves roll into the sandy shore.
Benacre Broad is unexpectedly lovely. A loop of woods and marshes surrounds a beautiful and fragile lake, cut off from the sea by a shifting bank of sand and shingle, decked with salt-bleached roots and tree trunks like a natural sculpture garden. The coast here has retreated more than 500 metres in the last couple of centuries, and salt water now often breaches the bird-rich lake. I eat my sandwich in the sheltered bird hide, listening for resident warblers in the reeds, but hear only the roar of the sea.
The atmospheric ruins of a huge medieval church stand on the cliffs above Benacre. St Andrew’s, Covehithe is now just the tall 14th-century tower and a smaller thatched building, under decaying arches, with the old octagonal carved font inside. At the end of the lane from church to coast, a red warning sign says “Footpath Closed” where the old coastal path ends abruptly on the collapsed cliff edge.
Later, the warm bar of the Swan in Southwold is extra welcome after a chilly day on windswept beaches. There’s port-laced mulled wine on offer, as well as creamy Baron Bigod brie from the Fen Farm Dairy or slow-cooked Blythburgh pork with apple.
Next day, I meet friends in the scone-scented Bloom cafe on Southwold High Street and we stroll across Southwold Common to Walberswick. We’re following a section of the nightjar waymarks of the Sandlings Walk, a long-distance hike through surviving fragments of heathland between Southwold and Ipswich. Since medieval times, 90% of what was once a continuous stretch of Suffolk heath has been lost.
The last autumn colours are glowing across Walberswick Common, with its bracken and birch trees. We head back along boardwalks by the Dunwich River, remembering the drowned town of Dunwich not far away under the waves, a kind of Suffolk Atlantis. The wind has dropped today and the marsh is full of noises: the sudden trilling of a Cetti’s warbler and the rare song of a bearded tit from the miles of whispering reedbeds. We cross the Blyth estuary by rowing boat ferry for lunch at the harbourside Sole Bay Fish Company, before heading back towards Southwold as the sun sets.
Accommodation was provided by Still Southwold (cabins from £617 for three nights) and transport by Greater Anglia (singles from Norwich to Lowestoft £10.10, advance singles from London to Lowestoft from £17).
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