To say the least, this announcement from CBS is considerable.
Which is: Come May, CBS News Radio will cease to exist.
Over there at the network’s web site it still says this:
CBS News Radio brings you the news you need from the brand you trust. Breaking news, continuous coverage and round-the-clock reporting. Trust CBS News Radio to be there when you need it.
Catch that last line? “Trust CBS News Radio to be there when you need it.”
Actually, as of May, no more. The network has this statement:
Today, we informed our CBS News Radio team and approximately 700 affiliated stations that we will end the service on May 22, 2026.
Unfortunately, this decision means that all positions within the CBS News Radio team are being eliminated. We understand how difficult this news is for our staff and their colleagues, who have worked side by side with us to cover some of the most significant stories of our time.
While this was a necessary decision, it was not an easy one. A shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service. We are sharing this announcement now to fulfill our commitments to our radio partners and affiliates, which require advance notice of the service’s conclusion.
For nearly 100 years, CBS News Radio has delivered original reporting to the nation—from Edward R. Murrow’s World War II reports in London to today’s daily White House updates. Our signature broadcast, “World News Roundup,” remains the longest-running newscast in the country. CBS News Radio served as the foundation for everything we have built since 1927.
The coming weeks will be difficult for the team members who have worked tirelessly at CBS News Radio. We are committed to supporting these valued colleagues with care and respect as we wind down operations. They have been critical to our success and remain treasured friends and professionals. We thank them deeply for their contributions.
Got all that?
For those unfamiliar with the history, CBS News Radio began in 1927 and would eventually become the employer of legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow. Murrow shot to fame during World War II when he would broadcast live from a Europe that was in the middle of the conflagration that had descended with the rise of Hitler’s Nazis and their invasion of the continent. His broadcasts for the CBS Radio News network, many during the Nazi “London Blitz” were riveting. Not to mention revolutionary in the use of radio to reach an audience of millions in the middle of wartime.
So dramatic were his broadcasts that on a visit back to New York in 1941 the founder and chairman of CBS, William Paley, threw a tribute dinner for Murrow at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, drawing a flesh-and-blood audience of over 1,000. One of the speakers that night was the poet Archibald MacLeish, who said to Murrow:
You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead. Without more emotion than needed be...you have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all. There were some people in this country who did not want the people of America to hear the things you had to say.
As it happened, a mere five days after that event the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And like it or not, the American people were forced to confront the realities of world war that Murrow had been broadcasting live for CBS News Radio.
This was, to say the least, something that had never been done before.
This sample line from but one of Murrow’s broadcasts illustrates the drama that CBS News Radio was famous for as it was broadcasting the seriously real action of World War II to its American audience - and the radio listening world beyond America.
This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna.... It's now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.
As the quaint old saying reminds, “time moves on.” So it does. And CBS News Radio found itself in today’s high-tech world incapable of moving along with that time. There has been, as a CBS executive noted, a “tsunami of technological change.”
Indeed there has been.
In one sense, the end of CBS News Radio should not be surprising. In a new world of podcasts and the Internet it should not surprise.
But be that as it may, the end of CBS News Radio is exactly a reminder of how the world in general - not to mention the world of presenting and reporting the news - has in fact not only changed but will continue to change.
Somewhere Edward R. Murrow is nodding his head.
