CBS News Radio: A beacon of broadcast journalism signs off

Before YouTube and podcasts, earlier than even the nightly tv newscasts, hundreds of thousands of individuals discovered what was occurring from CBS News Radio. But later this month, after 99 years, CBS News Radio is going silent.

CBS executives have cited the adjustments in how persons are more and more getting their information from social media, and the “challenging economic realities.”

Steve Kathan, the present (and closing) anchor of the “CBS World News Roundup,” found CBS News Radio within the Nineteen Sixties, listening on a transistor radio: “And that’s where I heard some of the great CBS News broadcasters,” he mentioned. “You were hearing something live. It was a live broadcast.”

“Everyone knows the legacy of CBS; everyone knows the power and respect that name engenders,” mentioned program host and correspondent Allison Keyes. She has coated so much of tales in her greater than 25 years in radio, however no different just like the one she coated reside 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 gray smoke.”

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

Changing how information was reported

Craig Swagler labored 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 mentioned.

CBS started as a radio community in 1927. But Swagler, who grew to become the community’s high radio government (and now runs Baltimore Public Media), says that it wasn’t till the yr earlier than World War II that CBS modified how information was reported – with a single broadcast. “It was March 13th, 1938. What was invented that day was the start of broadcast journalism,” Swagler mentioned.

Just the day earlier than, Hitler and his military had marched into Austria, swallowing the nation entire in what can be often known as the Anschlussor annexation. As Robert Trout reported:

“Right at this moment, Austria is no longer a nation, but is now officially 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 occurred to be in Europe, despatched there by CBS chief William S. Paley to recruit voices for the radio. But when Murrow noticed simply how harmful Hitler was, he and the executives again house set about broadcasting what was revolutionary for the time: a reside information program with distant experiences from 5 European cities – a technical marvel for the time – with Trout anchoring from New York. Murrow himself reported from Vienna, the primary time his voice was heard by the general 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 information program, was born. It introduced Americans the warfare… 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 inform you what you’ll have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday… It won’t be nice listening.

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

Radio as a “magic carpet”

As a toddler rising up in Texas, Dan Rather listened to CBS News Radio. “My father and mother were very interested in what was happening in Germany,” he mentioned. “He and my mother watched radio as the kind of magic carpet [that] “I’d take you there.”

And 10-year-old Dan traveled the world on that magic carpet. “I had rheumatic fever like a toddler,” he said. “So, I used to be confined to mattress. And sure, I’d keep riveted to the radio as a result of it was my fixed companion.”

Rather would turn into the anchor and managing editor of “The CBS Evening News.” But he started his profession in radio. He was reporting simply 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 simply the yr earlier than Rather arrived, however the usual he and his colleagues (dubbed “Murrow’s Boys”) had set remained a benchmark all through the information division. “All of them could write well,” Rather mentioned. “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” corresponded to Martha Teichner was studying from CBS News Radio. “I started out in broadcasting at a country-western radio station called WJEF in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” she mentioned. “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 – after which learn these scripts over the unique recordings. “I would read the transcriptions to Eric Sevareid or Walter Cronkite or Douglas Edwards,” she mentioned. “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 had been her earliest broadcasting mentors: “Absolutely,” she mentioned. “All male. There weren’t any women.”

Charles Osgood, who died two years in the past, joined CBS Radio in 1967. On his day by day “Osgood File” broadcasts, Osgood turned information into poetry. Here he’s describing what it meant to be a “person of the opposite sex sharing living quarters,” aka POSSLQ, a time period created by the US 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 supervisor, confirmed us the place, for greater than 40 years, workers in New York coordinated reporting from across the globe – from Rio De Janeiro, London and Paris, to Beijing, Seoul and Sydney. “We covered the whole world,” he mentioned.

Asked how CBS News Radio ought to be remembered, Rather replied, “CBS Radio should be remembered for becoming a national institution” – and one which did greater than ship the information. “It, for many, many years, was part — and I would argue not a small part — of what held the country together,” he mentioned.

It’s a time to recollect Edward R. Murrow’s well-known 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.