Douglas Edwards, first American TV news anchor, remembered as CBS ends radio service
Before teleprompters, Douglas Edwards improvised from notes and cue cards, then signed off after a 46-year CBS career as the network’s radio era neared its end.
Major Garrett’s introduction of Douglas Edwards’ final radio newscast lands as CBS prepares to shut down CBS News Radio on May 22, ending a service that had been feeding about 700 affiliate stations nationwide. The moment reaches beyond nostalgia. It marks the closing of a distribution system that helped knit together local newsrooms across the country, while recalling the man CBS calls the first anchor of the first nightly network TV newscast.
Edwards, born July 14, 1917, in Ada, Oklahoma, helped define the role before the word “anchor” had fully settled into American television. CBS says he first presented CBS Television News in 1947 and was tapped to anchor the first nightly network TV newscast in 1948, a program that later became Douglas Edwards with the News. In the early days, before teleprompters became standard equipment, Edwards worked from notes and cue cards and improvised live on air, giving the fledgling format a calm, authoritative center when television news was still finding its shape.
That template outlived Edwards’ own time in the chair. He left the CBS television anchor role in 1962, when Walter Cronkite took over, and the broadcast soon expanded from 15 minutes to 30, becoming the first half-hour nightly news show on American network television. Edwards stayed with CBS, continuing to work in television and radio until 1988, a long run that linked the network’s earliest experiments to the polished nightly newscasts that followed.
His final radio newscast aired on April 1, 1988, after 22 years anchoring CBS Radio’s The World Tonight and 46 years with the network. That broadcast now reads like a bridge between eras: the first generation of television authority figures giving way to the modern nightly-news format, and the radio service that carried his voice to listeners across the country now heading to silence. For CBS News Radio, the shutdown is a practical corporate decision. For the industry, it is also a reminder that the machinery Edwards helped build no longer looks like the one he entered, even if the need for a trusted national voice remains unchanged.
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