CBS News Radio will go silent later this month after 99 years, ending one of the most durable voices in American news. Steve Kathan, the current and final anchor of the CBS World News Roundup, said the network that helped shape his career will soon fall quiet after a century that began on radio.
Kathan first found CBS News Radio in the 1960s on a transistor radio. “And that’s where I heard some of the great CBS News broadcasters,” he said. “You were hearing something live. It was a live broadcast.” For him, and for the listeners who grew up with it, that immediacy was the point.
The shutdown lands at a moment when news habits have shifted sharply toward social media and when executives at CBS cite harsh economic realities. But the loss is bigger than a budget line. CBS began as a radio network in 1927, and the World News Roundup became America’s longest-running news program, a daily reminder of when radio was the main way many Americans learned what was happening beyond their own block.
Craig Swagler, who worked at CBS News Radio for 23 years, called the network’s origin story the start of broadcast journalism itself. “Getting the opportunity to come and work at that place as an entry-level desk assistant was a very starry-eyed dream to fulfill, to sit in that room with giants,” he said. “It was March 13th, 1938. What was invented that day was the start of broadcast journalism.”
That date mattered because CBS aired a live news program with remote reports from five European cities, and one of them came from Edward R. Murrow, then a 29-year-old in Europe sent there by CBS. Murrow reported from Vienna as the crisis in Austria unfolded, saying, “This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived. No one seems to know just when he will get here. But most people expect him sometime after 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.” Robert Trout cut in with the warning that “Austria is no longer a nation, but is now officially a part of the German empire. The Nazis have taken over the radio, and they are out to control everything.”
That is why the end of CBS News Radio is more than the retirement of an old format. It closes the line from a live report in Vienna to a network that taught listeners to expect news as it happened, not after it had been filtered, packaged or replayed. Allison Keyes, who has covered stories in radio for more than 25 years and was on the air live for the September 11, 2001 attacks, said the value of the medium was its directness. “People needed to know what was going on that day,” she said. “In real time, no filter, no politics. Here’s what’s happening.”
Keyes remembered the fear and smoke of that morning in vivid terms: “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.” That sort of reporting, plain and immediate, was the world CBS News Radio helped define. The question now is not whether the network mattered. It did. The question is how much of that live, unfussy authority survives in the news culture that is replacing it.
Murrow later gave the program another of its defining chapters on April 15, 1945, when he described what he found at the Buchenwald concentration camp after the Germans had fled. “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. With CBS News Radio now heading off the air, that inheritance is what disappears: not just a program, but a way of telling the truth while the moment is still unfolding.
