Much is being made in recent days of
the nearly 100-year history of CBS Radio News in the wake of the news late last week that CBS is shutting the unit down for good.
But that’s the thing: Radio news as
represented by CBS News is history.
News on the radio? It’s like having press releases delivered to a TV columnist by fax machine.
The new
powers-that-be who are calling the shots at CBS News -- most notably editor in chief Bari Weiss and the man she reports to, Paramount CEO David Ellison -- have apparently come to the conclusion that
CBS Radio has no potential for future growth in a digital world powered by video, not audio.
To them, CBS
Radio is just another vestigial legacy medium in which they have no grounding or sentiment.
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Many of the stories that came out over the weekend that reported
the end of CBS Radio News were styled in the manner of obituaries.
Sorrowful observers and veterans of radio
news mourned the news like a death. “This is another part of the landscape that has fallen off into the sea. It’s a loss for the country and for the industry,” said one quotable
personage.
“It’s another piece of America that is gone,” lamented Dan Rather, 94, when he was reached by an NPR reporter.
Edward R. Murrow and his famous radio broadcasts from London during the blitz were evoked all over the place.
They deserve their place in the history of broadcast news, but World War II happened a long, long time ago.
The end came
suddenly. The news broke on Friday that an announcement had been made internally at CBS that the radio news unit would be shuttered and all employees laid off.
It became effective immediately on Friday. One pictures a newsroom filled with news staff in the morning and by evening, nothing left but someone’s uneaten lunch left in the breakroom
fridge.
Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski reportedly delivered the bad news via a companywide memo, evidently choosing not to deliver such bad news
in person. Perhaps neither of them knew where the CBS Radio newsroom was.
“Radio is woven into the fabric of CBS News and that’s always going to
be part of our history,” said a statement attributed to Weiss, whose own history with CBS News began less than six months ago.
“I want you to
know that we did everything we could, including before I joined the company, to try and find a viable solution to sustain the radio operation,” she said, sounding like a surgeon who just lost a
patient.
Except for whatever was left of CBS Radio News when it closed last Friday, CBS was for all intents and purposes already out of the radio business, having jettisoned
the last of its radio stations in 2017 during the reign of Les Moonves.
I am willing to bet that members of our
younger generations do not really know what a radio is, or a fax machine or a street-corner mailbox.
They
might not recognize real news reporting when they hear it either, but that is something they will have to deal with in their own time, not mine.
The last star of CBS Radio was probably Charles Osgood, who died in 2024 at age 91. He did his own self-styled commentaries -- “The Osgood File” -- on CBS Radio from 1971 to
2017, and hosted “CBS News Sunday Morning” on CBS Television from 1994 to 2016.
Signing off of the TV show every Sunday, he
was famous for saying, “Until then, I’ll see you on the radio.”