"OMG, They Killed CBS News Radio!"
We’ll admit right up front here that we didn’t see it coming, but we should have. It was as obvious as when they killed Kenny on “South Park.”
When the drumbeat grew loudest that significant layoffs were coming to CBS News by last week’s end, we didn’t stop to think about the small group of people who still were churning out hourly newscasts to about 700 radio stations from coast to coast. The five notes of the network’s opening stinger are almost as famous as the three notes heard on rival NBC since the golden age of radio.
The same NBC that saw the light decades before, and pulled the plug on its own radio news network by selling it off in 1987, recognizing that the economics of the radio business didn’t make sense even back then.
The economics of radio news didn’t get better in the subsequent fifty years, and that was one of the reasons that CBS News leadership, in the form of Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss and President Tom Cibrowski, cited for announcing the end of the longest-running broadcast news operation this May 22nd.
It will come just shy of what would have been the network’s 100th anniversary next year.
CBS Radio started its existence back in 1927, originally as “United Independent Broadcasters.” A 26-year-old William Paley would push his family’s cigar business, a major advertiser on radio at the time, to buy the nascent chain of stations. Paley would rename the business to the “Columbia Broadcasting System” and take over as its president the following year. Paley would build CBS into a serious competitor to RCA’s “National Broadcasting Company”, which had just launched the year before CBS in 1926. NBC actually came into being as two different radio chains, known as the “Red” and “Blue” networks. (Broadcast history junkies like ourselves know that the smaller “Blue” network was eventually sold under threat of government antitrust action, and became the basis for the “American Broadcasting Company,” also known as ABC.)
All three would eventually move into television, which, of course, became the much larger business after the Second World War ended and, by the 1950s, was pushing radio aside in both audience and advertising. But contrary to some popular belief, radio isn’t dead. It still reaches a large majority of the population, primarily through “out-of-home” listening — meaning those people who listen in their vehicles on the road.
But before television captured the nation’s attention, it was radio that introduced the notion of receiving the news in real time, live from wherever it happened. Edward R. Murrow’s dispatches from the rooftops in London during the German air raids on that city during the war brought him name and voice to the attention of millions, leading him to become the patron saint of broadcast journalism. His name is now on the major national awards for the best practice of the craft.
He wasn’t alone. The roll call of voices heard on CBS News Radio is an incredible one, ranging from Lowell Thomas, whose voice had been heard on Movietone newsreels in theaters, to Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, Richard C. Hottelet, and William Shirer—a group who would become known as “the Murrow Boys.” They would be joined in the years to come by Robert Trout, Douglas Edwards, and a young man named Walter Cronkite, who would go on to find some success in that “new fad” called television. Plus, our two personal favorites to ever sit at the CBS Radio microphones, Christopher Glenn and Charles Osgood.
Yet all this rich history behind the name CBS News is probably in large part why the last vestige of its storied roots in radio had to be ended by the current caretakers of “The House that Murrow built.” Radio is the medium of what some might dismissively label as “old people.” It doesn’t really seem to fit with the digital media darlings of streaming video, podcasting, and social media platforms aplenty.
We’ve spent the weekend since the announcement that CBS News Radio is ending, reading the various takes on the decision. Predictably, they have ranged from sincere eulogies bemoaning the end of the institution, or at least what was left of it, to the clinical dissections that radio has been dead or dying since the internet killed off what television had mortally wounded in previous decades.
The figure most often cited was that CBS News Radio made only $67,000 in January 2026 and was unprofitable. While we can believe this, we do wonder whether the economics of unloading an entire unit of people in a single cut made it an easy target for CBS News leadership. They are under pressure from their parent company, Paramount-Skydance, to find significant operating savings wherever possible. (And that’s before the company takes on a massive pile of $110 Billion or so to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery.)
Economic realities aside, the truth is that CBS News Radio wasn’t that much of a drain on a company that shelled out $150 Million to acquire “The Free Press” and its wunderkind CEO and Editor-In-Chief, the aforementioned Ms. Weiss. To bring her talents to be Editor-In-Chief for all of CBS News, Paramount CEO and “Would-be owner of Hollywood” David Ellison had no problem spending the nine-figure sum needed to bring on Weiss so she can deliver a vision for CBS News that she defines with this quote: “It’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it.”
We’d point out that just having the name CBS News on 700 radio stations every hour or so was, at the very least, a pretty major promotional platform that wasn’t costing more money than another campaign for the struggling morning or evening programs that CBS News is putting on television each weekday. Remember the claim in recent years: “More people get their news from ABC News than any other source”? It was ABC’s radio news division that was a key part of the calculation supporting the claim. (By the way, ABC is still in the radio news business, with over 1,400 affiliated stations and probably more to come, as many of those stations that were carrying CBS News Radio scramble for a new provider.)
But we’d venture to guess that perhaps the bigger motivation in signing off the CBS News brand from radio is that it was too visible a sign of the organization’s “Old media” roots. The ghosts of Murrow, Cronkite, and their compatriots were just a little too embedded in the hallways of the CBS Broadcast Center on New York City’s West 57th Street. For someone with no real experience in broadcast journalism, let alone broadcasting itself, there was little nostalgia for something nearly a century old.
The previous owners of CBS had shown how little radio mattered when it sold off its flagship radio station that bore the CBS letters in its name. WCBS radio was spun off, along with all of the major radio stations CBS then owned, to Entercom (now known as Audacy) in 2017. Then, in late 2024, WCBS radio and its 57-year-old all-news format were silenced by Audacy, replaced by “ESPN Radio New York” on 880 AM.
It is absolutely fair to say that CBS News Radio could have done more to prevent its ultimate fate. There was not much of a digital footprint for the audio-only news content produced each day. Even Fox News has figured out how to make radio a complementary part of its ever-growing empire. Given the much-speculated belief that Ms. Weiss, her only boss, Mr. Ellison, and their interested patron in the Oval Office, want to take CBS News on more of a turn to the right on the editorial spectrum, one would think that Fox’s complementary success with radio would have been of note.
Apparently not.
Count us among those who will miss the radio version of CBS News when it signs off for the last time, probably because we grew up with it as a trusted, reliable, and authoritative voice for all of the major news events, ranging from November 22nd, 1963, to September 11th, 2001, and beyond, right up until May 22nd, 2026.
It’s a sad farewell to the foundation of that house that Murrow built, which is now being remodeled into something far more modern.
And unlike Kenny in “South Park,” Weiss and Ellison aren’t likely to un-kill it in the next episode. Which will, of course, be available for streaming on “Paramount Plus.”
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