A eulogy for CBS News Radio

Harvey Nagler, writing in the broadcasting trade publication Radio Ink

Harvey Nagler was a CBS News Vice President in charge of Radio from 1998 to 2016.

Today marks the end of an era in broadcast journalism and represents another substantive blow to our democracy. After nearly 99 years, CBS News Radio will cease to exist, and with it, another trusted voice of reliable journalism will be gone.

CBS News Radio set the standard for objective news reporting. It was committed to unbiased independent journalism at a time when partisan reporting is the norm. As our Founding Fathers understood our republic requires an informed and educated citizenry. Peggy Noonan once called reliable journalism “part of our country’s survival system.” That is how our democracy survives.

In 1927, the Columbia Broadcasting System debuted as a network,  though not yet as a news service. It was not until March 13, 1938, that CBS Radio News began its legendary broadcasts. Edward Murrow—who incidentally, at that time, did not use his middle initial on air—broadcast live from Vienna as Adolph Hitler’s troops invaded Austria. He was joined by reporters in Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome, with Robert Trout anchoring in New York, vividly describing live the start of the war. That broadcast was dubbed “the World News Roundup,” which continues to this day as the nation’s longest-running news broadcast.

Two years later, in 1940, CBS and Murrow once again made history describing live as the first bombs hit London in the Blitz.

Modern-day CBS News Radio has been as consequential as the Murrow era broadcasts… a tribute to the men and women who have worked at the network in recent decades.

With reporters around the globe, millions of Americans depended on it for hourly newscasts and breaking news coverage. In recent decades, CBS News Radio was the recipient of dozens of major awards, over fifty from the Radio Television News Directors Association, among the broadcast industry’s highest honors. The network won seven consecutive awards for “Overall Excellence” from 2007 to 2013, an accomplishment that has not been duplicated.

At its peak, CBS reached 32 million listeners each week-an enviable audience for any media company! Even with a declining radio audience, a Nielsen study found that radio still reaches 93% of American adults, the largest reach of any medium in the United States. CBS News Radio today has been heard by 22 million listeners through its 700 affiliates nationwide, including many All-News stations. Those news consumers will now have to look elsewhere for information about what is going on in our world.

The greatest loss may be to the hundreds of small local stations in rural America whose only source of national and international news has been CBS. Many of these stations have already dramatically reduced their own local news operations.

Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS, has said the service is closing because “of challenging economic realities,” concluding  it was “impossible to continue the service.” The company is seeking government approval for its merger with  Warner Bros. Discovery.

There is no question that people are now getting their news in different ways, such as digital platforms, podcasts, TikTok, YouTube, newsletters, and other online sources. But many of these sources are neither objective nor reliable. As the podcaster Andrew Schulz has pointed out, social media platforms have splintered audiences into “a thousand different realities,” often with only the most inflammatory rhetoric on either side of the political system rising above the noise.

As The Washington Post famously declared on February 17, 2017, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It is a sad moment that one of the most important institutions in the history of American broadcast journalism, CBS News Radio is turning out the lights tonight.