CBS News Radio signs off with tribute to 9/11 coverage
CBS News Radio closed after nearly 100 years by replaying the first shock of Sept. 11, when radio carried national trauma in real time to 700 stations.
As CBS News Radio faded from the air Friday, Major Garrett opened its final tribute by taking listeners back to the first minutes after the North Tower was hit at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. The moment served as more than a remembrance. It showed what legacy radio once did best: relay breaking catastrophe instantly, clearly and to a broad public that had not yet turned to phones or streaming for emergency updates.
CBS News Radio signed off on Friday, May 22, 2026, after nearly a century of broadcasting. Launched in September 1927, the service reached an estimated 700 stations across the United States and helped define the sound of national news through the voices of Edward R. Murrow, Robert Trout, Douglas Edwards, Charles Osgood and Dan Rather. Its closing marked the end of a distinct era in which one wire of audio could still stitch together a country under stress.
The Sept. 11 coverage remains the most searing example of that civic role. Nineteen al Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial airliners and carried out the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history, striking the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back. The attacks killed 2,977 people, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says all 19 hijackers had entered the United States by early July 2001, and its investigation, code-named PENTTBOM, became the largest case in the bureau’s history. More than half of the FBI’s agents were involved, and investigators pursued more than half a million leads. Those numbers reflect the scale of the crime, but they also underline why the first broadcasts mattered so much: in the absence of social media, radio was where many Americans first understood that the country itself was under attack.
Garrett’s tribute was part of a broader CBS News Radio flashback series that revisited other historic moments before the shutdown. By closing with Sept. 11, CBS framed its own exit as a transition out of a news culture built on live, shared audio and into a media landscape where that kind of national emergency service is no longer guaranteed.
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