Our colleague Curtis Houck’s earlier writeup of the new but not improved CBS Evening News suggests that the ongoing turmoil is driven by the newscast’s new format, editorial choices, and anchor delivery. Tonight’s report on efforts to end the war in Ukraine confirms that thesis.
Watch as anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DeBois open the newscast with an introduction to the Ukraine story:
CBS EVENING NEWS
2/13/25
6:30 PM
JOHN DICKERSON: President Trump is pressing ahead with his plan for trying to end the nearly 3-year old war in Ukraine. At The White House today, he said U.S. and Russian officials will be meeting tomorrow in Munich, and Ukraine is invited to join them.
MAURICE DUBOIS: But a spokesperson for President Zelenskyy said Ukraine does not expect to hold any talks with Russia, not right now. He said the United States, Europe, and Ukraine must all first agree on a common position.
DICKERSON: The Ukraine war will be the main topic at the opening of the 61st Munich Security Conference held in a city synonymous with Europe's appeasement of Hitler at a conference in 1938 in the run-up to World War II. History some critics are raising to describe President Trump's dealings with Russian President Putin over Ukraine.
DUBOIS: We begin tonight with Imtiaz Tyab, who has been covering the Ukraine war from the start.
The report is your standard pro-Ukraine fare, tailored to reflect current events. Correspondent Imtiaz Tyab showed flashback video from his time in the front. The bias in the story is towards Ukraine and Zelenskyy, and away from Trump and Putin.
The most grotesque part of that bias comes from Dickerson’s own framing of the story. Dickerson compared an as of yet indeterminate peace deal with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 handover of the Sudetenland in order to appease Hitler. The “critics say” rhetorical dodge isn’t enough because Dickerson has displayed a penchant for this kind of editorializing.
“Why can’t John read the news?”, posited the quotation cited in the earlier item on CBS. With each passing episode of the revamped newscast it becomes clear that, simply, John doesn’t want to.
Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on Thursday, February 13th, 2025:
JOHN DICKERSON: President Trump is pressing ahead with his plan for trying to end the nearly 3-year old war in Ukraine. At The White House today, he said U.S. and Russian officials will be meeting tomorrow in Munich, and Ukraine is invited to join them.
MAURICE DUBOIS: But a spokesperson for President Zelenskyy said Ukraine does not expect to hold any talks with Russia, not right now. He said the United States, Europe, and Ukraine must all first agree on a common position.
DICKERSON: The Ukraine war will be the main topic at the opening of the 61st Munich Security Conference held in a city synonymous with Europe's appeasement of Hitler at a conference in 1938 in the run-up to World War II. History some critics are raising to describe President Trump's dealings with Russian President Putin over Ukraine.
DUBOIS: We begin tonight with Imtiaz Tyab, who has been covering the Ukraine war from the start.
IMTIAZ TYAB: For Ukraine, this has always been a war of survival. Nearly three years after Russia's full-scale invasion, there have been hundreds of thousands of casualties, and Russian forces occupy around 20% of the country's territory. It's a war we have covered from the very beginning.
(TYAB, IN A FIELD): We just had some incoming Russian shelling.
TYAB: In May 2022, we came under heavy Russian fire in the Kherson region. With so much still at stake, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now in a diplomatic battle over who will negotiate the conflict's end. "I articulate this very clearly to our partners," he said. "Any bilateral talks about Ukraine that is without us, we will not accept." His comments followed U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's pointed remarks at the NATO headquarters in Brussels about Kyiv potentially having to make major concessions to Moscow, where Hegseth was asked if the U.S. was abandoning Ukraine.
PETE HEGSETH: There is no betrayal there. There is a recognition that the whole world and the United States is invested and interested in peace. A negotiated peace. As President Trump has said, stopping the killing.
TYAB: Ukrainian and European leaders were also worried President Trump's decision to host a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin has also left them out of any potential peace talks. German defense minister Boris Pistorius warned, "The Trump administration has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun." In Moscow, the mood was decidedly different. Evening news shows were almost gleeful as they praised Presidents Trump and Putin for having agreed to hold the talks. All this, while in Ukraine the war raged on. Earlier today, the eastern city of Kramatorsk was targeted by Russian fighter jets. At least one person was killed and five injured, according to first responders.
DICKERSON: And Imtiaz Tyab joins us now. Imtiaz, the Secretary of Defense says this is not a betrayal of the Ukrainians. How are the Ukrainians seeing it?
TYAB: Well, betrayal is a very strong word, but that really does seem to be what Ukrainians are feeling tonight. You know, we were actually on the ground in Kyiv when President Trump won reelection back in November, and the people we spoke to then said they believed him when he said that he would end the war, but they also believed that it would be Russia that would be ordered to make concessions and not Ukraine, and so the fear now is that at best that the front lines will be frozen, which means the fighting will stop and Russia will keep the territories already taken, but at worst, that this is simply a chance for Putin to take a pause, reload, and then restart his war on Ukraine.
DUBOIS: Imtiaz, you have reported from Ukraine many times before the war and during the war. What are your observations on how the Ukrainians have been evolving throughout all of this?
TYAB: Look, it's an understatement to say that Ukraine is a country forever changed. So many of their best and brightest have been killed the fighting, and as you saw in our report, we ourselves have come very close to those front lines, which has seen entire cities razed to the ground, and Ukrainians tell us that they know they can rebuild. They know they can heal from the physical wounds, but the enormous toll Vladimir Putin's war has had on them and their families, well, those internal wounds will be much, much harder to recover from.
DICKERSON: Imtiaz Tyab in London.
