March 20th, 2026
Breaking: The Shutdown Announced
On Friday, March 20, 2026, CBS News delivered a stunning blow to American journalism: the entire CBS News Radio division will cease operations on May 22, 2026 just months short of its 100th anniversary. The announcement, made simultaneously to staff and to approximately 700 affiliated radio stations across the country, marks the end of the last remaining original radio network news service in the United States.
CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and President Tom Cibrowski delivered the news in a joint memo to staff, writing: “A shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service.” The closure ends nearly a century of continuous radio newscasting, a legacy stretching from the golden age of radio through the internet era.
The radio shutdown is part of a broader restructuring that will also eliminate approximately 6% of CBS News’s roughly 1,100-person workforce, meaning more than 60 employees will be departing. It represents the second round of layoffs in six months at the division, following a previous round in October 2025 after Paramount Skydance took over the company.
The Birth of CBS: From Rivalry to Radio Giant
To understand what is being lost, one must go back to the beginning. It was 1927, and a New York talent agent named Arthur Judson had just been rebuffed. He had approached David Sarnoff of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) with an idea to promote classical music on the airwaves, and Sarnoff turned him away flat. Rather than accepting defeat, the enterprising Judson did something remarkable: he decided to build his own radio network.
On January 27, 1927, Judson founded United Independent Broadcasters, Inc. (UIB) in Chicago. In the summer of that year, the Columbia Phonograph Company, parent of the Columbia Records label, invested in the fledgling network, and it was rebranded as the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System. The network made its official on-air debut on September 18, 1927, broadcasting from WOR in Newark, New Jersey, feeding 16 affiliated stations with a live orchestra performance.
The early days were financially precarious. Operational costs, especially payments to AT&T for use of its land lines, were steep. By early 1928, the network had changed hands again, sold to brothers Isaac and Leon Levy owners of Philadelphia affiliate WCAU and their partner Jerome Louchheim. It was through the Levy family connection that a 26-year-old cigar magnate’s son named William S. Paley would enter the picture and change broadcasting history.
Paley’s father ran the La Palina cigar company in Philadelphia, and young William had seen firsthand how radio advertising could transform a brand their cigar sales had reportedly doubled after sponsoring a local radio program. Captivated by the medium’s potential, Paley invested $400,000 in the struggling network in 1928, was quickly elected its president, and stripped the Columbia record company’s name from the corporate title. The network was reborn simply as the Columbia Broadcasting System — CBS.
Under Paley’s inspired leadership, CBS grew with astonishing speed. He offered affiliates free programming in exchange for airtime a revolutionary deal that rapidly expanded the CBS footprint across the country. By the turn of 1929, the network had 47 affiliates. By 1931, even at the depths of the Great Depression, CBS had 400 employees, 79 affiliates, and turned a net profit of $2.3 million. By 1935, CBS had become the largest radio network in the United States.
The Rise of CBS News: Murrow, the War, and the World News Roundup
While CBS prospered with entertainment programming — signing stars like Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, and George Burns & Gracie Allen Paley had a grander vision: he believed news and public affairs could give CBS something NBC could not easily replicate: gravitas. In 1930, he hired journalist Ed Klauber to build a news and public affairs operation, and by 1933, the Columbia News Service, the first radio network news operation in the country, had been established.
But the true coming of age for CBS News arrived in 1938, when a young broadcaster named Edward R. Murrow stepped to a microphone in Vienna, Austria, on the night of March 13th. Hitler’s forces were marching into the country, and Murrow then serving as CBS’s European Director of Talks was asked to report live. What followed was a broadcast that changed journalism forever.
Murrow and his colleague William Shirer orchestrated the first live, multi-city international radio news broadcast a “European News Roundup” connecting correspondents in Vienna, London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. It was a technological and journalistic miracle for its time, linking cities by shortwave radio when the parties couldn’t always even hear one another. The broadcast became the direct precursor to the World News Roundup, which became the longest-running news broadcast in American history, airing continuously from 1938 until this year.
Throughout World War II, Murrow and his celebrated “Murrow Boys” a team of correspondents including Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, and Howard K. Smith brought the war into American living rooms with an immediacy and emotional power that had never been experienced before. Murrow’s rooftop dispatches during the Nazi bombing of London, invariably opening with “This… is London,” and closing with “Good night, and good luck,” became the defining voice of a generation. In the decades that followed, legendary broadcasters like Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Douglas Edwards, and Dallas Townsend carried on the CBS News Radio tradition.
The Long Decline: Television, Streaming, and Economic Pressures
The seeds of radio’s decline were planted in the 1950s, when television began its conquest of the American living room. The medium that had united the nation during World War II gradually ceded its central role to the television screen. CBS moved aggressively into television — launching iconic programs like I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Twilight Zone even as it maintained its radio news operation.
CBS sold its owned-and-operated radio stations in 2017, but continued providing hourly network newscasts to affiliate stations through CBS News Radio keeping the flame of the original service alive. Yet the economics kept deteriorating. In late 2025, CBS News had already cut the Weekend Roundup and the World News Roundup Late Edition in an attempt to save money while keeping the core service going. It was not enough.
The broader context is one of institutional upheaval. Paramount Skydance, which completed its takeover of Paramount in 2025, is carrying a massive debt load and pursuing a deal that could reach $111 billion to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery which would bring CBS News and CNN under the same corporate roof. That merger is expected to lead to further consolidation, shared news-gathering operations, bureau closures, and additional job cuts across both news organizations.
Bari Weiss, the Writers Guild, and an Industry in Mourning
The announcement has drawn intense scrutiny given who is delivering it. Bari Weiss, the former New York Times opinion writer and founder of The Free Press, was installed as CBS News Editor-in-Chief in October 2025 a hire that signaled a dramatic editorial pivot for the storied news division. At a town hall in January 2026, Weiss laid out her philosophy: the future of CBS News is digital and on-demand. Staffers were told to stop thinking in terms of linear television time slots and instead focus on building audiences across streaming and social platforms.
In delivering the radio news to staff on Friday, Weiss acknowledged the weight of the moment. “Radio is woven into the fabric of CBS News and that’s always going to be part of our history,” she told employees. “I want you to know that we did everything we could, including before I joined the company, to try and find a viable solution to sustain the radio operation. But with the radical changes in the media industry, we just could not find a way to make that possible.”
The Writers Guild of America reacted swiftly and forcefully, condemning the decision. The WGA East and WGA West released a joint statement calling CBS News Radio “an institution, where generations of the finest journalists in the country spent their careers reporting the news and holding people in power to account.” The guild directed its sharpest criticism at CBS’s leadership, calling the decision “indicative of Bari Weiss and David Ellison’s inept leadership.”
Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who spent 25 years at the network succeeding Walter Cronkite, offered a more mournful reaction. “Given the way things are going, I was saddened but I wasn’t surprised by it,” Rather said. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod called CBS News Radio’s legacy “enormous,” writing on social media that the network had produced “some of the most iconic reporting” and “spawned many of the greatest broadcast journalists of the 20th century.”
What Remains — and What Is Lost Forever
CBS News still has formidable properties. 60 Minutes remains one of television’s most trusted newsmagazines. CBS Sunday Morning draws a devoted audience. The CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings continue to air, even as both programs run well behind their rivals in the ratings.
But what will be gone on May 22, 2026 is irreplaceable. The World News Roundup which launched on March 13, 1938 with Murrow’s voice echoing from Vienna will air for the last time. The hourly newscasts that served 700 radio stations across the country, keeping communities informed for nearly a century, will fall silent. CBS News Radio was the last of the original three great radio networks still operating; NBC Radio News and the Mutual Broadcasting System both shut down years ago. With its closure, an unbroken thread connecting modern journalism all the way back to the early days of the republic’s great communications revolution will be severed.
The question that lingers is whether the digital platforms that are meant to replace radio news can truly serve the same democratic function delivering trusted, verified journalism to every corner of the country, in the car, in the kitchen, in the fields the way a free, over-the-air radio newscast could. For nearly 100 years, the answer was simple. After May 22, America will have to find a new one.