CBS News Radio Signs Off After 99 Years, Edward R Murrow Legacy Ends
CBS News Radio will go silent later this month after 99 years, ending a service that once told listeners what was happening before television newscasts, YouTube and podcasts. CBS executives cited changing news habits and challenging economic realities for the shutdown.
Steve Kathan, the current and final anchor of the CBS World News Roundup, said he first found the service in the 1960s on a transistor radio: “And that's where I heard some of the great CBS News broadcasters,” he said.
Edward R Murrow and CBS
CBS began as a radio network in 1927, and one of its defining broadcasts came on March 13, 1938, when the network aired a live news program with remote reports from five European cities. Robert Trout anchored from New York, and Edward R. Murrow reported from Vienna. The broadcast led to the creation of the CBS World News Roundup, which became America’s longest-running news program.
Craig Swagler, who worked at CBS News Radio for 23 years, said, “It was March 13th, 1938. What was invented that day was the start of broadcast journalism,” tying the shutdown to the history the network is now closing.
Live reporting on record
Allison Keyes, a host and correspondent, said the service’s legacy was built on immediacy: “You were hearing something live. It was a live broadcast.” She also recalled her live reporting on September 11, 2001, saying, “I can hardly breathe. It looks like a nuclear war happened here. You can't see the sky at all. It's all grey smoke.”
Keyes said of that day, “People needed to know what was going on that day,” and described the aim of the reporting as “in real time, no filter, no politics. Here's what's happening.”
Buchenwald and the final signoff
Murrow’s reporting on April 15, 1945, from Buchenwald remains part of the same history. “Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday … It will not be pleasant listening. … At another part of the camp, they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his slee” he said, describing what he found after the Germans had fled.
Kathan called the experience of listening to CBS in the 1960s formative: “You were hearing something live. It was a live broadcast.” As the service goes silent later this month, CBS is ending one of the longest continuous radio news operations in the country, and the last voice on the Roundup is carrying that history to its close.
