CBS News Radio: A beacon of broadcast journalism signs off

Before YouTube and podcasts, before even the nightly television newscasts, millions of people found out what was happening from CBS News Radio. But later this month, after 99 years, CBS News Radio is going silent.

CBS executives have cited the changes in how people are getting their news increasingly from social media, and the “challenging economic realities.”

Steve Kathan, the current (and final) anchor of the “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 broadcasters,” he said. “You were hearing something live. It was a live broadcast.”

“Everyone knows the legacy of CBS; everybody knows the power and respect that that name engenders,” said program host and correspondent Allison Keyes. She has covered a lot of stories in her more than 25 years in radio, but no other like the one she covered live on September 11, 2001:

“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.”

“People needed to know what was going on that day,” Keyes said, “in real time, no filter, no politics. Here’s what’s happening.“

Changing how news was reported

Craig Swagler worked at CBS News Radio for 23 years. “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.

CBS began as a radio network in 1927. But Swagler, who became the network’s top radio executive (and now runs Baltimore Public Media), says that it wasn’t until the year before World War II that CBS changed how news was reported – with a single broadcast. “It was March 13th, 1938. What was invented that day was the start of broadcast journalism,” Swagler said.

Just the day before, Hitler and his army had marched into Austria, swallowing the country whole in what would be known as the Anschluss, or annexation. As Robert Trout reported:

“Right at this moment, 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.”

A then-unknown 29-year-old Edward R. Murrow happened to be in Europe, sent there by CBS chief William S. Paley to recruit voices for the radio. But when Murrow observed just how dangerous Hitler was, he and the executives back home set about broadcasting what was revolutionary for the time: a live news program with remote reports from five European cities – a technical marvel for the time – with Trout anchoring from New York. Murrow himself reported from Vienna, the first time his voice was heard by the public:

“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.”

That 1938 broadcast electrified audiences. And so, the “CBS World News Roundup,” America’s longest-running news program, was born. It brought Americans the war … and its grisly aftermath.

Here’s Murrow on April 15, 1945, describing 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 sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. An elderly man standing beside me said, “The children – enemies of the state.'”

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Listen to Edward R. Murrow’s World War II broadcasts (Video)

Radio as a “magic carpet”

As a child growing up in Texas, Dan Rather listened to CBS News Radio. “My father and mother were very interested in what was happening in Germany,” he said. “He and my mother viewed radio as the kind of magic carpet [that] would take you there.”

And 10-year-old Dan traveled the world on that magic carpet. “I had rheumatic fever as a child,” he said. “So, I was confined to bed. And yes, I would stay riveted to the radio because it was my constant companion.”

Rather would become the anchor and managing editor of “The CBS Evening News.” But he began his career in radio. He was reporting just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy:

“The mood in Dallas is still one of very deep shock. There are many people in Dallas who sincerely and literally still have a very difficult time believing what happened here today.”

Murrow had left CBS just the year before Rather arrived, but the standard he and his colleagues (dubbed “Murrow’s Boys”) had set remained a benchmark throughout the news division. “All of them could write well,” Rather said. “You didn’t work for Murrow if you couldn’t write well. And this put him in conflict sometimes with the people who ran the network. They didn’t think that some of the correspondents had voices for radio. I’d read, say, Charles Kuralt or a Collingwood script, I would say to myself, ‘Dan, you’ve got to make yourself a better writer and you better do it in a hurry or you’re not going to be around here.'”

“We covered the whole world”  

Before she joined CBS in 1977, “Sunday Morning” correspondent Martha Teichner was learning from CBS News Radio. “I started out in broadcasting at a country-western radio station called WJEF in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” she said. “It was a CBS Radio affiliate. I used CBS Radio to teach me how to be a reporter and a broadcaster.”

After hours, Teichner transcribed what she heard – and then read those scripts over the original recordings. “I would read the transcriptions to Eric Sevareid or Walter Cronkite or Douglas Edwards,” she said. “And that taught me how they wrote, and it taught me how they breathed in a sentence. Like karaoke, almost. I really was learning from the best.”

Those voices were her earliest broadcasting mentors: “Absolutely,” she said. “All male. There weren’t any women.”

Charles Osgood, who died two years ago, joined CBS Radio in 1967. On his daily “Osgood File” broadcasts, Osgood turned news into poetry. Here he is describing what it meant to be a “person of the opposite sex sharing living quarters,” a.k.a. POSSLQ, a term created by the U.S. Census Bureau:  

“There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
If you would be my POSSLQ.
You live with me, and I with you
and you would be my POSSLQ…”

Dustin Gervais, a CBS Radio News manager, showed us where, for more than 40 years, staff in New York coordinated reporting from around the globe – from Rio De Janeiro, London and Paris, to Beijing, Seoul and Sydney. “We covered the whole world,” he said.

Asked how CBS News Radio should be remembered, Rather replied, “CBS Radio should be remembered for becoming a national institution” – and one that did more than deliver the news. “It, for many, many years, was part — and I would argue not a small part — of what held the country together,” he said.

It’s a time to remember Edward R. Murrow’s famous sign-off: “Good night, and good luck.”

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Watch an extended interview with Dan Rather (Video)

     
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Story produced by Jay Kernis. Editor: Jason Schmidt.