CBS to end its radio news after nearly 100 years
CBS News Radio, once known as CBS Radio News, will air its final report Friday, May 22, after 99 years of broadcasting news and information in the U.S. and globally.
Industry experts said CBS News Radio has long been considered one the best radio newscasts in the country, and its closing signals the end of an era.
For nearly a century, CBS News Radio aired its familiar top-of-the-hour sounder to start the newscast, which the company said was heard on more than 700 stations.
Each week CBS News Radio produced 168 hourly newscasts and countless reports from the White House, Congress, its global bureaus and cities and towns around the world.
Businessman William S. Paley in 1928 created what was then called the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System out of a group of 16 stations, it was legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow who established CBS as a strong news organization during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Murrow and his corps of reporters stationed across Europe brought the sounds of World War II into homes across the U.S.
Murrow described the Nazi death camps that he witnessed as Allied troops liberated them in April of 1945.
“If you are at lunch or have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio,” he said during one broadcast describing how German men and women, some of them just days from being executed by the Nazis were liberated. “We saw about 100 men in civilian clothes with rifles. Advancing in open order across a field.”
Murrow and correspondents, Richard C. Hottelet, Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood and later Walter Cronkite, along with several others, set the tone for CBS News and its radio reporting for years. Many of the correspondents, writers, producers and technicians did double duty, working for both CBS News Radio and later the CBS Evening News.
On Nov. 22, 1963, CBS News Radio broke the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, minutes before Walter Cronkite delivered his famous bulletin on TV.
Correspondent Dan Rather was on the phone from Dealey Plaza in Dallas, near where Kennedy had been shot, when news anchors Alan Jackson and Dallas Townsend read the bulletin that Kennedy was dead. CBS News Radio’s announcement was several minutes ahead of Cronkite.
“We repeat, it has just been announced, President Kennedy is dead,” CBS reported. “John F. Kennedy has died, from the wound in Dallas.” Moments later the network played the national anthem out of respect for the now deceased president.
For years, other radio networks competed with CBS Radio, but because of the network’s deep bench of reporters, and top-tier, all-news affiliates, including WTOP in D.C., WCBS in New York, WBBM in Chicago, KNX in Los Angeles and KCBS in San Francisco, the network dominated radio coverage for decades.
Other services, including the Mutual Broadcasting System, NBC Radio and UPI Radio also eventually closed.
CBS News Radio anchor Nick Young was on the air minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, just four and a half miles from the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan.
Bill Vitka, a retired CBS News Radio anchor, anchored evenings at the network for 19 years. He won a Peabody Award for his coverage of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995.
“When you worked for CBS, you felt a responsibility to the public to get the story right and to get it out,” Vitka said. “I think it is a lot of history and a lot of truth telling. I think that was the network’s job. That is the gold standard,” Vitka told WTOP.
Elon University Retired Journalism Professor Richard Landesberg is a 35-year radio news veteran. He said he was saddened by CBS’ decision to close the radio operation. Landesberg said he believes in today’s digital news media environment, radio can compete against growing competition from social media, the internet and other sources.
“All of those other ways of getting news and information are great, but none of them work when you’re in traffic in the Beltway,” Landesberg told WTOP, while saluting the men and women who carried on the tradition of Edward R. Murrow and others.
“It was a place that brought news home to people.” Landesberg said. “The best producers, the best editors, the best writers. People who took news seriously.”
CBS News blamed challenging economic times for its decision to end radio operations.
While WTOP is losing a partner with the demise of CBS News Radio on May 22, WTOP will continue delivering news on-air and online, as it has for decades.