On Monday, during his maiden voyage as anchor of CBS Evening News, Tony Dokoupil was about to wrap a segment on Nicolás Maduro with some presumably brilliant geopolitical commentary when the producers instead posted an image of Senator Mark Kelly. Flustered, the newsman teed up a segment on Governor Tim Walz, before pivoting again: “To other news, as you just heard… to other news now, to Governor Walz… No, we’re going to do Mark Kelly,” he said.

In the instantly viral clip, which you may have seen, Tony then regrettably amplified the flub—“First day, first day, big problems here”—before waving the white flag entirely: “Uh, are we going to Kelly here? Or are we going to go to Jonah Kaplan?” he asked the producers. Seconds of silence, then: “We’re doing Mark Kelly…” Shit happens, as Shakespeare said, but the Dokoupil blunder drew predictably heavy, if slightly hyperbolic, fire against the backdrop of all the recent Bari Weiss player-hating—her controversial preemption of a 60 Minutes segment, her Erika Kirk misfire, her naive Bret and Anderson poaching efforts, etcetera. Admittedly, Tony brought some of it on himself. Days earlier, he’d channeled Bari’s warmed-over anti-media schtick into his own mission statement about the need to restore “trust,” throwing his fellow travelers—including his wife, MS NOW anchor Katy Tur—under the bus in the process. He’d also promised to be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite,” yet couldn’t seem to muster a modicum of his predecessor’s composure. In his early broadcasts, Tony has also developed a newfound sycophancy for the Trump administration—saluting Marco Rubio, both-sidesing January 6—effortlessly showcasing the malleability of people who get paid to read teleprompters. And he hadn’t really even rehearsed. Like Bari, Tony was expected to hit the ground running. He arrived at Evening News without his own executive producer, and is still in his courtship phase with existing E.P. Kim Harvey. (Presumably, if this becomes a mess, she’ll be the first to go.). Former Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell famously rehearsed her entire show every night before going to air. The ill-fated Dickerson-DuBois duo practiced their show for months before it even debuted. Tony, by contrast, was still writing his geopolitical commentary minutes before he went live, per sources familiar. The copy was haphazardly pasted into different parts of his script and that of his producers, hence the asynchronicity. (They cleaned it up for the official version that’s now online.) The day one fumble offered fresh fodder for eager critics. Some even suspected defiance by a staffer manning the teleprompter—which, given the vibes on West 57th Street these days, couldn’t immediately be ruled out. In truth, however, this wholly forgivable screw-up was merely the latest manifestation of a problem that has bedeviled Bari since her arrival—namely, that TV news is actually really hard, and it requires mastery of myriad organizational and managerial skills that aren’t often learned on the fly. Bari may be ambitious, competitive, and capable of both working 18-hour days and successfully exiting a company for $150 million. But as I’ve often noted in these pages, she’s also not a seasoned executive. The morning after Tony’s debut, she was running late for the 9 a.m. editorial call and had to start by phoning in from her office before joining in person, according to CBS News sources. Surely everyone has learned their lesson; Tony did rehearse ahead of the next evening’s broadcast, and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski was on hand in the control room to ensure no repeat errors. But, in the end, Weiss is accountable for Tony’s success. After the 60 Minutes scandal, Scott Pelley admonished her for treating the show like a “part-time job”—which, frankly, it is (ask Anderson). In truth, Pelley misdiagnosed the problem. Bari isn’t doing too little, she’s doing too much, and learning the hard lessons along the way.

Obviously, Bari has infinitely more runway than Chris Licht or Kim Godwin—strivers who presumably dreamed of running a network or a news division. Weiss, for her part, probably never even countenanced the opportunity until the Skydance negotiations got real. Bari’s critics tend to discount the view from David Ellison and the rest of the Paramount management team. The CBS News they inherited was already in terminal decline, and they certainly didn’t hire Bari to save it—in fact, preserving its legacy would have been a financially disastrous decision.

Instead, the Ellison & Co. thesis for CBS News is rational enough: The three broadcast networks have long converged around the same distribution platform and a center-left ideological locus. If you’re the perennial third-place, money-losing network, pivoting to a wide-open center-right lane with a digital media entrepreneur makes quite a bit of sense, particularly in America circa 2026. Of course, executing on that will take time: per CBS, Tony’s debut episode was up 9 percent in total viewership and 20 percent in the demo compared to previous Monday broadcasts. But it was also down by hefty double-digit percentages when compared to every previous anchor debut going back to Katie Couric. Anyway, past network news scandalettes have proven that things get worse before they get better. Even if Bari has Ellison’s support, she’s vastly outnumbered by her employees, none of whom were consulted on this vision shift. Many staffers were discouraged by her decision to engage in a public spat with George Clooney (“CBS News doesn’t do that,” one told me.) And they have been especially turned off by Bari’s wife, Nellie Bowles, using The Free Press to mock the “public meltdown” over the aforementioned 60 Minutes scandal. (Nellie also tweaked a media reporter for obsessively covering Bari’s every move, which was actually kind of funny.) Bari doesn’t put much stock in the soft leadership aspects of the job. She privately chafes at the laziness and mediocrity of some staffers and has told multiple people that she’ll fire anyone who isn’t willing to work hard and get on board with her leadership, per sources who heard her say it directly. (Presumably, she doesn’t think it takes 40 people to make a TV show.) Staffers also say she has at times been visibly frustrated by how hard it is for her bookers to land big-name guests—a task, as you’ll recall, that she has often taken up herself by pulling out her phone in meetings and texting sources directly. Finally, for a journalist who claims to champion a free press—and who once published an audio recording she obtained of an internal CBS News meeting—she seems remarkably miffed by the leaks coming out of her own shop. (Bari did not comment for this piece.) Your read on these details is, of course, a Rorschach test. Surely Ellison & Co. could do without these headaches—but, from their vantage point, Bari is doing just fine, has every right to be frustrated with the existing complacency, and probably has license to fire whomever she wants. And this drama is merely a minor nuisance amid the quest for an $108 billion deal. It’s hard to imagine them buckling anytime soon: Whether or not she can program 20 minutes of error-free television per day, Bari enmeshed herself with the mogul class by proving that she didn’t care what other people thought—defenestrating herself before others could. That’s what the money is for, and these guys know that better than anyone.