CBS News Radio closure hits hard, especially in Murrow territory | The Free Press Initiative
Published 1:00 pm Tuesday, April 7, 2026
As America struggles with the overall decline of trusted news outlets and shared knowledge they provide, the loss of CBS News Radio feels like a grim milestone in its descent.
Especially in Washington, where Edward R. Murrow spent his formative years before he elevated CBS Radio and the emerging medium of broadcast journalism in the early to mid 20th century.
The latest owner of CBS, Paramount Skydance, announced the radio network’s closure on March 20. It will cease providing news to around 700 local radio stations on May 22.
“It’s a really sad day to see that happen,” said Bruce Pinkleton, dean of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.
Pinkleton said that despite the end of CBS Radio, Murrow remains “our North Star. And frankly, he’s really a North Star for a profession.”
Murrow graduated from WSU in 1930. He was born in North Carolina and moved to Skagit County at age 6. After graduating from Edison High School he earned money for college by wielding an ax on a Clallam County logging crew.
A few years later, Murrow’s fearless broadcasts from Europe during World War II established CBS Radio and elevated him to a preeminent broadcaster.
Murrow was an early multiplatform journalist, starting with radio in its early days and then moving to television as it grew in the 1950s.
CBS sold its network-owned, local radio stations in 2017 as the business faced new competition from online music platforms but continued to operate the national network supporting affiliates nationwide.
Its corporate parent, Paramount, was acquired in 2025 by Skydance, a media company started by David Ellison, son of the software tycoon Larry Ellison.
Paramount Skydance announced the CBS Radio shutdown shortly after it agreed to acquire another media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery, for $110 billion including debt.
More cuts are coming. The company reportedly expects to find at least $6 billion in savings from the mashup.
Meanwhile Americans are losing yet another source of trusted news. Local CBS Radio affiliates are looking for other sources of national and international news but there are fewer options, less competition and none with the same pedigree.
“It’s just kind of an indicator of where radio and where the news business is going,” said Frank Lenzi, news director at Seattle’s KIRO Newsradio, a CBS affiliate.
Lenzi said the shutdown “came as a shock but isn’t that surprising” after cutbacks at CBS and other places.
Radio, like newspapers, lost much ground to online sources of news and television but remains a preferred source for millions of Americans.
Last year 11% of Americans got news “often” from radio, compared to 7% that often got news from printed newspapers and magazines, according to Pew Research Center. Most get news from digital devices (56%) and television (32%).
Pew found that 5% of U.S. adults still prefer radio for news, the same percent that prefers printed newspaper or magazines. Five percent of the adult population is about 13,350,000 people.
Radio also “continues to deliver massive reach and strong advertising performance,” according to a Nielsen report this month. It said radio reaches 93% of U.S. adults each month, including 89% of people aged 18 to 34.
Regionally, KIRO Newsradio is the Seattle market’s largest private news radio station and second overall, behind public radio station KUOW, according to Nielsen tracking. It’s owned by Bonneville International, a Salt Lake City media company owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
KIRO is mostly a talk show format but it still has a relatively large local newsroom. Lenzi said it employs about 10 full-time newspeople and has six or seven additional people on call. Another three or four work at its MyNorthwest digital site.
The station uses CBS for three-minute top of the hour newscasts and special reports when there is breaking news, usually 60-second reports at the bottom of the hour, Lenzi said.
The network also provides longer pieces for weekends and overnight periods, as well as debriefs with correspondents, stand-alone audio and sound bites.
It’s a shame Murrow isn’t around to comment on the rash of media consolidation that preceded CBS Radio’s demise.
But we know from a famous speech in 1958 what he’d think of news providers being swallowed by conglomerates mostly focused on feeding our endless appetite for video entertainment.
Here’s an excerpt from Murrow’s still relevant speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association:
“One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.”
Murrow was speaking during a new era of media technology, television.
He warned us what could happen if informing the public with trusted news wasn’t prioritized by networks.
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire,” he said in the 1958 speech.
“But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”
Sure enough, look what’s happening now that we spend more than six hours a day watching television and its online equivalents and fewer minutes reading, watching and listening to news.
The great battle continues but we’ve got other shows to watch.
This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.
