CBS News Radio Ends, Tribute Revisits First Convention Broadcasts

CBS News Radio is heading toward its final signoff, and the farewell is turning back to one of the medium’s most important early moments: a 1932 Republican National Convention broadcast that captured the reach radio once had in American life.

Major Garrett, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent and host of The Takeout, introduced the archival clip as the network prepared to shut down CBS News Radio on May 22. The closure will end programming carried by about 700 affiliated stations nationwide and eliminate all jobs on the radio team, a decision CBS tied to challenging economic realities and a shift in radio programming strategies.

The clip reaches back to Chicago Stadium in Chicago, Illinois, where the Republican National Convention met from June 14 to June 16, 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression. The convention opened shortly after noon on June 14 under Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio and was tied to Flag Day and George Washington. Republicans renominated President Herbert Hoover and Vice President Charles Curtis, but the larger significance was the medium itself: radio was becoming the country’s shared national platform.

That 1932 broadcast was not the first presidential nominating convention ever heard on radio. The Republican National Convention in Cleveland in June 1924 is widely credited as the first, with WTAM and other stations carrying portions of the proceedings. By the early 1930s, radio ownership was already surging, rising from about 40 percent of U.S. families at the start of the decade to nearly 90 percent by 1940. The numbers helped make conventions feel like national events, not just party rituals.

CBS News says its radio service traces its roots to 1927, and its signature program, World News Roundup, remains the longest-running newscast in the country. The service also carries the legacy of Edward R. Murrow’s World War II reports from London, a period when radio was not simply a delivery system but a common civic experience.

Michael Harrison, publisher of the radio trade publication Talkers, called the shutdown “a shame” and “a loss for the country and for the industry.” The loss is bigger than one newsroom. In the podcast and streaming era, audio is abundant, but shared national listening is harder to find, and the end of CBS News Radio marks another step away from the era when one broadcast could reach the same audience all at once.