You can almost hear the chortling from Curtis Houck in his March 20 Media Research Center post:
Following the first round of layoffs back on September 29, CBS News’s parent company Paramount Skydance instituted its second set of rumored cuts Friday that, along with four notable correspondents being shown the door, CBS News Radio will be killed off entirely after a historic 99-year-old run that helped usher in news on a national scale and move the country to radio (and, later, television).
All told, around six percent of the workforce will be laid off (between 60 to 70 people), down from the originally feared 15 percent.
Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski told staff in a memo that“[i]t’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it” and with “[n]ew audiences…burgeoning in new places…we are pressing forward with ambitious plans to grow and invest so that we can be there for them.”
The two wrote a second company memo that specifically addressed the decision about CBS News Radio, explaining the “CBS News Radio team and approximately 700 affiliated stations that we will end the service on May 22, 2026.” They added the decision “not…easy” but “necessary.”
They explained “[a] shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service” even though the platform “delivered original reporting to the nation—from Edward R. Murrow’s World War II reports in London to today’s daily White House updates” and “the longest-running newscast in the country,” “World News Roundup.”
Don’t let Houck fool you — he’s more than happy that Weiss is doing the right-wing dirty work of killing off a major broadcasting operation.
The next day, Jeffrey Lord contributed a eulogy of sorts:
As the quaint old saying reminds, “time moves on.” So it does. And CBS News Radio found itself in today’s high-tech world incapable of moving along with that time. There has been, as a CBS executive noted, a “tsunami of technological change.”
Indeed there has been.
In one sense, the end of CBS News Radio should not be surprising. In a new world of podcasts and the Internet it should not surprise.
But be that as it may, the end of CBS News Radio is exactly a reminder of how the world in general – not to mention the world of presenting and reporting the news – has in fact not only changed but will continue to change.
Somewhere Edward R. Murrow is nodding his head.
Or perhaps he’s shaking his head because there seems to be little reason for Weiss to kill off CBS News Radio beyond having a scalp right-wingers like Houck can tout.