Needless to say, today (May 22) marks the end of an institution. CBS News – CBS Radio – CBS Newsradio, whatever you want to call, it is having its plug pulled after 99 years of keeping people engaged and informed.
If any of you have been following Past Daily, these past 10 years, you will know that the vast majority of my historic news comes from CBS. It was the network I faithfully recorded every day since Watergate and going back to the 1940s via collections, garage sales and dumpster diving. It’s kind of a shrine over here.
But what makes this all rather sad is the manner with which the last rites were performed.
Most stations pulled up stakes and left town before the bitter end – some switching to ABC News as early as yesterday – big hurry to say a few words, shed a few tears and move quickly on to the next hysteria – not waiting around for a proper burial.
If Radio has lost it for you over the years you are most likely in the majority. Radio lost it for a lot of people, starting as far back as the 1980s. As some of you may recall in 1986, the first big purge and the beginnings of desecration began. CBS News was folded into The Entertainment division and many of the legendary voices were either offered early retirement or just a pink slip. News bureaus, the life blood of any network, were shut all over the world. Running times of programs were cut, or in the case of The CBS World News Roundup, going from 15 minutes to 12 minutes to 10 minutes to 7 minutes to 5 minutes to approximately 2 minutes.by the end.
It was a death by attrition but many people thought, no matter how hackneyed and abbreviated everything got, there would still be a CBS Radio Network. Maybe not the Tiffany Network, as it was often referred to, but rapidly descending into the Rust Network. Still, it was there.
But in the 1980s, during the Reagan Era, de-regulation became the mode of operation and stations as well as networks were caught up in a frenzy of takeovers and downsizing until the Internet came along and Radio, that thing a goodly chunk of the population grew up with, became hopelessly outdated and worse, a financial drain on these mega conglomerates.
Radio, long that long-standing bastion of go-to for useful information and discovering pop music scattered off to You Tube, Podcasting, Tik-Tok and social media of every kind and type, replacing thought-out verbal observations with explosions, fist-fights and name calling. Face it, who needs a thoughtful wordsmith when you can have a monosyllabic “influencer” gushing at high volume for a few seconds?
So rather than switch over to streaming, podcasting and being the go-to place for useful, unbiased observations and reporting via new and developing media, better to just shut the whole thing down and go someplace else, it will soon be forgotten about anyway, right?
Maybe – maybe not. Most people I know lately have been getting their news and information, not from here but from Toronto or London or Berlin or Paris or Tokyo – everywhere else in the world but everywhere else, where news is an essential ingredient to an informed life. It is not considered all that important here it seems.
So as a Memorial/Last Rites/taking-the-casket-away, CBS Newsradio ran a one hour (40 minutes with all the commercials cut out) tribute to a network whose astonishing moments could fill days of listening, rather than boiled down to a Cliffsnotes version of material heard thousands of times. You take what you can get and let’s hurry up and bury the body before anybody notices.
Not to necessarily put in a plug for Past Daily, but we routinely run CBS News as well as Documentaries – at last count there are a few thousand to dive into to with more added every day – just saying. We’re here – so bookmark us.
So, I’m sad to see you go, even though you stopped being my reliable source for several years now you, were were capable of pulling a few rabbits out of the hat.
Bonne nuit et bonne chance.
