CBS News Radio signs off after 99 years of broadcasting history

CBS News Radio closed its 99-year run with a final sign-off anchored by Christopher Cruise and capped by Edward R. Murrow’s “Good night, and good luck” at about 11:31 p.m. ET on Friday, May 22, 2026. The ending landed as more than a nostalgic broadcast moment. It marked the disappearance of one of the country’s defining appointment-audio institutions, a network that once set the pace for how millions of listeners heard the day’s news.

CBS News had announced in March that the service would be shut down because of “challenging economic realities” and a shift in radio programming strategies. The collapse was immediate for the newsroom behind it: all jobs on the CBS News Radio team were eliminated, and the Writers Guild of America East said 26 of its members with decades of experience would be out of work. CBS News Radio had been carried by an estimated 700 affiliate stations nationwide, giving the shutdown an impact far beyond New York and the corporate newsroom that ran it.

The retrospective that preceded the final sign-off, “Good Night and Good Luck,” leaned into the network’s place in broadcast history. CBS News Radio launched in September 1927, and its early years helped define the sound of national journalism in the United States. The first broadcast of World News Roundup aired on March 13, 1938, hosted by Robert Trout and featuring the radio debut of Edward R. Murrow. CBS News said World News Roundup remained the longest-running newscast in the country.

Its archives carried the weight of the 20th century: Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Cuban missile crisis, the 1977 New York City blackout, the Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks and the Columbia disaster. That record gave the network an authority that later platforms could imitate but never quite reproduce. In an era of podcasts, streaming and constantly refreshed alerts, CBS News Radio represented the older model of news delivery, one built around a fixed time, a familiar voice and a national audience listening together.

Veterans and current staffers framed the closure as the loss of an American institution. Steve Kathan, longtime anchor of the CBS World News Roundup, said the service had been around for a long time and mattered to the country. Dan Rather called CBS Radio “a national institution” and said it had helped hold the country together. Allison Keyes and Rich Lamb described a newsroom that was fair, dependable and central to listeners’ daily lives. Michael Harrison of Talkers called the shutdown a loss for the country and the radio industry. Some stations had already moved to ABC News for their regular newscasts, a sign of where the market has gone: away from appointment listening and toward on-demand news that fits the habits of a fragmented audience.