The voice that told Americans about Pearl Harbor, the fall of Berlin, and the assassination of a president will go quiet on May 22. CBS Radio News, which has delivered top-of-the-hour bulletins to roughly 700 stations since September 1927, is being shut down as part of a 6% workforce reduction at CBS News.

Sixty-some employees received the news Friday in a memo from editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski. “A shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service,” they wrote. The service predates the CBS television network itself — it gave William S. Paley his start and launched Edward R. Murrow, whose 1938 dispatch on Germany’s annexation of Austria became a foundational moment in broadcast journalism.

Murrow’s rooftop reports from wartime London, Walter Cronkite’s steady baritone, the flagship “World News Roundup” — all of it funneled through the same radio pipeline now marked for demolition. The closure leaves ABC News as the sole Big Three network still operating a radio news division.

Dan Rather, 94, who anchored for CBS across both radio and television, offered a brief eulogy: “It’s another piece of America that is gone.”

The timing carries its own weight. The service is being killed during a period of cascading global crises — wars, political upheaval, institutional fracture — precisely the kind of moment that once made radio news essential. Weiss and Cibrowski gestured toward the future, noting that “new audiences are burgeoning in new places.” The places they mean are podcasts and digital platforms, where CBS intends to chase younger listeners.

One year short of a century. The signal just wasn’t strong enough anymore.

Sources