CBS News Radio signed off the air Friday night, ending a run that began in September 1927 and reached an estimated 700 stations across the United States. The service, a fixed part of the abc of American radio for nearly a century, went silent at 11:45 p.m. ET after CBS announced in March that it would shutter the news operation because of challenging economic realities.
The shutdown closes a chapter that began seven years after what is widely recognized as the first commercial radio broadcast. CBS News Radio carried the first broadcast of baseball's World Series in 1938 and aired an interview with Babe Ruth the next year, while also bringing Edward R. Murrow onto the air for the first time in 1938. Murrow would later become one of the medium's defining voices, with rooftop reports from London during the Blitz and coverage from Buchenwald after the Germans had fled.
By the time CBS News Radio went off the air, its place in U.S. media history was already settled. It covered Pearl Harbor in 1941, the D-Day invasion in 1944, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the New York City blackout in 1977, the Gulf War, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Its signature broadcast, World News Roundup, remained the longest-running newscast in the country, a fact CBS highlighted in its own farewell. Tom Cibrowski and Bari Weiss said the service had delivered original reporting to the nation for nearly 100 years, from Murrow's World War II reports in London to today's daily White House updates, and called CBS News Radio the foundation for everything the company has built since 1927.
For former correspondents, the end felt bigger than a cost cut. Steve Kathan said, “It's been around for a long time. Really, an American institution is what we're losing here,” while Dan Rather said CBS Radio should be remembered as a national institution that mattered deeply to the development of news beyond newspapers and helped hold the country together. Allison Keyes, who covered the news from Lower Manhattan on 9/11, recalled that people needed to know what was happening in real time, “no filter, no politics,” a reminder of the service's old bargain with listeners: tell them first, and tell them plainly.
The loss also leaves a gap in the daily machinery of radio news at a time when the medium still depends on national services to feed local stations. CBS News Radio is gone, but the stories it carried — from Murrow's clipped wartime dispatches to the chaos of 9/11 — remain part of the archive of American broadcast journalism, and the silence it left Friday night is likely to be heard far beyond one newsroom.
