Variety’s Brian Steinberg revealed Thursday that longtime CBS News fixture Norah O’Donnell has won the sweepstakes to become — or, in O’Donnell’s case, return as — the third co-host of CBS Mornings, starting on September 8.
CBS News President Tom Cibrowski told Steinberg that “we believe there is a lot of life left in morning television, and therefore we are putting our best people on the field,” with O’Donnell joining current co-hosts Gayle King and Nate Burleson to “bring relatability, credibility, experience, and knowledge” to viewers.
Cibrowski added O’Donnell’s “experience and energy makes her a perfect match” for Burleson and King, who have gone through a long line of CBS correspondents or weekend hosts rotating as the third seat since Tony Dokoupil shipped out in December to anchor the Evening News.
Status’s Oliver Darcy made this prediction back on August 18, considering “[s]he is a reliable hand with strong range and significant anchoring experience” and had “worked to ingratiate herself with [editor-in-chief Bari] Weiss.”
For CBS morning show viewers, it’ll require little to no adjustment as, back when the show was called CBS This Morning, O’Donnell was a weekday co-host from September 2012 until May 2019, when she shifted to anchor the CBS Evening News.
Steinberg explained the ratings picture as grim:
CBS has long come in third behind NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” but in recent months has seen its standing in early news slip further.
Season to date as of August 30, the overall “CBS Mornings” has fallen about 9% from the year-earlier period to approximately 1.7 million, according to figures from Nielsen. Both “Today” and “GMA” enjoy viewership of just under 3 million and have seen their audiences increase. The standing of “CBS Mornings” among people between 25 and 54, the crowd most coveted by advertisers in news programming, is eroding noticeably — down 20% from a year ago, to about 278,000 viewers. “Today” is off 2% to 612,000 while “GMA” is up 2% to 478,000.
He praised Oprah’s best friend King and former NFL player Burleson as “strong journalists,” but emphasized, “O’Donnell brings a set of hard-news credentials that are hard to match.”
Steinberg also divulged more revelations about a long-rumored change in format to the third-place program: “Look for ‘CBS Mornings’ to tamp down some of the feature segments it shows and instead dive into live discussions on important topics, says Cibrowski, who wants to bring more ‘in-the-moment’ discussions tied to the news cycle.”
“He also expects both King and O’Donnell to book important newsmakers from a wide variety of fields for revealing interviews. ‘These two work non-stop to make stuff happen,’ he says. When asked how soon viewers would start seeing more of these kinds of segments, Cibrowski replied, ‘Very quickly,’” he added.
Cibrowski was correct as, less than four minutes into Thursday’s show, they conducted a nearly eight-minute-long phone interview with Hillary Clinton on the passing of far-left feminist Gloria Steinem.
However, Steinberg concluded with the fact that a format change was also deployed in February 2025 for the CBS Evening News with John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois co-anchoring, as there was an emphasis on deeper and longer segments and a focus on stories less tied to the day-to-day news cycle. Of course, that crashed and burned, and both were out of the job by October 2025.
