Before YouTube and podcasts, and before the nightly television newscasts, millions of people found out what was happening on CBS News Radio. But later this month, 99 years later, CBS News Radio goes silent.
CBS executives spoke of changes in the way people get their news increasingly from social media, as well as “challenging economic realities.”
Steve Kathan, current (and final) anchor of “CBS World News Roundup,” discovered CBS News Radio in the 1960s, listening on a transistor radio: “And that’s where I heard some of the great CBS News anchors,” he said. “You were asked something live. It was broadcast live.”
“Everyone knows the legacy of CBS; everyone knows the power and respect that name generates,” said show host and reporter Allison Keyes. He has told many stories in his more than 25 years on the radio, but none quite like the one he told live on September 11, 2001:
“I can’t breathe. It looks like there’s a nuclear war going on here. You can’t see the sky at all. It’s gray smoke.”
“People needed to know what was happening that day,” Keyes said, “in real time, no filter, no politics. Here’s what happens.“
Changing the way news is reported
Craig Swagler has worked at CBS News Radio for 23 years. “Having the opportunity to come and work in that place as a desk assistant for startups was a star-studded dream come true, to live in that giant room,” he said.
CBS began as a radio network in 1927. But Swagler, who became a network radio executive (and now runs Baltimore Public Media), says it wasn’t until the year before World War II that CBS changed. How the news was reported – in one broadcast. “It was March 13, 1938. What was established that day was the beginning of broadcast journalism,” said Swagler.
The day before, Hitler and his army had marched into Austria, swallowing up the entire country in what would be known as Anschlussor installation. As Robert Trout reports:
“Right now, Austria is no longer a country, but it is now officially part of the German empire. The Nazis have taken over the radio, and they want to control everything.”
The then 29-year-old unknown Edward R. Murrow was in Europe, sent there by CBS executive William S. Paley to solicit radio voices. But when Murrow realized how dangerous Hitler was, he and the management at home began broadcasting what was revolutionary at the time: a live news program with remote reports from five European cities – a technological marvel at the time – with Trout anchored in New York. Murrow himself reported from Vienna, the first time his voice was heard in public:
“This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. It’s almost 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler hasn’t arrived yet. No one seems to know when he’ll be here. But most people expect him sometime after ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
That 1938 broadcast electrified audiences. Thus, “CBS World News Roundup,” America’s longest-running news program, was born. It brought war to the American people … and its tragic consequences.
Here is Murrow on April 15, 1945, describing what he found at the Buchenwald concentration camp after the Germans fled:
“Let me tell you what you would have seen and heard if you had been with me on Thursday … It will not be pleasant to listen. … In one part of the camp, they showed me children, hundreds. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeves, he showed me his number. It was drawn on his arm. An old man standing next to me said, “Children – enemies of the state.
FROM HOME: Listen to Edward R. Murrow’s World War II Broadcast (Video)
Radio as a “magic carpet”
As a child growing up in Texas, Dan Instead listened to CBS News Radio. “My father and mother were very interested in what was happening in Germany,” he said. “He and my mother looked at the radio as a magic carpet [that] I’ll take you there.”
And 10-year-old Dan walked the world on that magic carpet. “I had arthritis as a child,” he said. “So, I locked myself in bed. Yes, I always loved the radio because it was always mine.”
Instead he would become the anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News.” But he started his career in radio. He was reporting just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy:
“The situation in Dallas is still very shocking. There are many people in Dallas who are having a very hard time believing what happened here today.”
Murrow had left CBS just a year before Rather arrived, but the quality of him and his colleagues (known as the “Murrow Boys”) remained a hallmark of every aspect of the news. “All of them could write well,” said Father. “You didn’t work for Murrow if you couldn’t write well. And this got him into trouble sometimes with the people who ran the network. They didn’t think the other correspondents had radio voices. I could read, say, Charles Kuralt or the Collingwood script, I’d say to myself, ‘Dan, you’ve got to make yourself a better writer and not go’ or do it better here.
“We’re all over the world”
Before joining CBS in 1977, “Sunday Morning” reporter Martha Teichner was an intern at CBS News Radio. “I started broadcasting at a country western radio station called WJEF in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” he said. “It was a subsidiary of CBS Radio. I used CBS Radio to teach me how to be a journalist and broadcaster.”
Hours later, Teichner wrote down what he heard — and then read those notes over the original recording. “I could read Eric Sevareid or Walter Cronkite or Douglas Edwards,” he said. “And that taught me how to write, and it taught me how to breathe a sentence. Like karaoke, almost. I was really learning from the best.”
Those words were his first mentors in broadcasting: “Absolutely,” he said. “All men. There were no women.”
Charles Osgood, who died two years ago, joined CBS Radio in 1967. In his daily “Osgood File” broadcast, Osgood turned stories into poetry. Here he explains what it meant to be a “person of the opposite sex who shares a residence,” also known as POSSLQ, a term created by the US Census Bureau:
“There’s nothing I won’t do
If you can be my POSSLQ.
You stay with me, and I stay with you
and you will be my POSLQ…”
Dustin Gervais, host of CBS Radio News, showed us where, for more than 40 years, New York workers have been covering the world – from Rio De Janeiro, London and Paris, Beijing, Seoul and Sydney. “We brought the whole world together,” he said.
CBS News 
Asked how CBS News Radio should be remembered, he instead replied, “CBS Radio should be remembered for being a national institution” – and one that did more than deliver the news. “For many years, it was part – and I wouldn’t argue a small part – of what held the country together,” he said.
It’s time to remember Edward R. Murrow’s famous signature: “Good night, and good luck.”
WEB SPECIAL: Watch extended interview with Dan Rather (Video)
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Story produced by Jay Kernis. Editor: Jason Schmidt.
