The MAGA-curious CBS News has been caught in yet another embarrassing gaffe.
Journalist Matt Guttman was filling in for Tony Dokoupil on the CBS Evening News when the topic of America’s cost-of-living crisis was broached.
“The cost of living in the U.S. is now rising faster than pay,” Guttman said at the beginning of the segment, as a stock photo of a receipt flashed onto the screen. “For the first time in years, spikes in the cost of gas, rent, groceries—forcing working class Americans to make tough choices.”
Upon closer inspection, however, the stock video clip depicted on screen wasn’t from America at all, but Thailand. The receipt was clearly in the Thai script—and the prices therefore in bhat, not dollars.
“Not the biggest deal, but on Tuesday night’s edition of the CBS Evening News, the show appears to have used a stock video clip from Thailand to illustrate a story about ‘the cost of living in the U.S.,’” Guardian reporter Jeremy Barr noted.
Indeed, the photo’s origin—which was uploaded to iStockphoto.com in 2023—is Thailand, the Daily Beast found.
A representative for CBS Evening News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Thai shopping footage was just the latest blunder for the network’s beleaguered evening show. It could, potentially, be related to the mass staff exodus that took place just weeks after editor-in-chief Bari Weiss installed Dokoupil as anchor in February.
At least six of CBS Evening News’ roughly 20 producers took voluntary buyouts ahead of looming company-wide layoffs, the New York Post reported at the time.
Since then, Dokoupil has led the show into a ratings spiral.
And, while the 45-year-old was out of his usual anchor seat on “assignment” this week, that assignment didn’t exactly go as planned. The former Daily Beast staffer was reportedly meant to cover President Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping in China this week. However, the network failed to get his Chinese visa in time.
Instead of broadcasting from the People’s Republic of China, Dokoupil broadcast from the Republic of China, better known as Tawain, while his competitors—NBC News’s Tom Llamas and ABC News’s David Muir—anchored from the hotspot Beijing. The approximate distance from Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, to Beijing is about 1,070 miles—a similar distance to that of New York to Tampa, Florida. At the end of the Wednesday show, the cameraman collapsed and Dokoupil could be heard saying “call a doctor,” before the camera shot flipped to a startled-looking Guttman in New York.
Two CBS correspondents are still traveling with Trump in China.
In its promotional social media post for Wednesday’s broadcast, CBS News vaguely said Dokoupil was ready to anchor “CBS Evening News LIVE from the region.”
CBS News has been thrust into chaos since it was taken over by Weiss, a conservative blogger who had no professional experience in TV news before assuming her new role.
Billionaire David Ellison’s installation of Weiss was regarded by many as an effort to appease the Trump administration.
But it’s not clear how well that’s going. Nielsen ratings, obtained by media newsletter Status, show that the week beginning April 20 was the lowest-rated stretch of viewership since Dokoupil was promoted to the evening news slot by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss in January.
