As goes CBS Radio News, so goes the idea that news media should serve the public interest

When CBS Radio News goes silent on May 22, 2026, Americans will lose access to news programming they’ve tuned into from their living rooms, kitchens and cars for nearly a century.

The once-bipartisan idea that the nation’s media should exist to serve democracy continues to fade with it, too.

As a media historian, I think the story of CBS Radio News’ rise and fall cannot be told without telling another parallel story: the story of how the U.S. stopped demanding that media serve the public interest.

When CBS was born in 1927, radio was ascendant, and this new form of mass communication was spurring vibrant discussions about how media could better serve democracy.

Americans had already seen how concentrated wealth during the Gilded Age had tilted the news ecosystem by overemphasizing the concerns of the rich while glossing over inequality, graft and corruption. World War I further demonstrated the power of mass media to shape public opinion through propaganda, reinforcing calls for democratic oversight of broadcasting.

Just how to regulate radio was up for debate. But there was broad consensus across party lines that government could play a role in protecting the public from concentrated media power and, with it, foreign misinformation, bad-faith special interest messaging or fraudulent advertising.

The formative years

CBS radio traces its origins to the United Independent Broadcasters, a network of 16 local stations founded by music manager Arthur L. Judson. When Columbia Records bought a stake, it was renamed the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.

Early broadcasts simply involved announcers reading short breaking-news dispatches distributed by the United Press wire service. Within months, Columbia sold its share to investors including William S. Paley, who streamlined the name to CBS.

Paley was no public media crusader. He was a businessman who wanted radio to turn a profit. But his management reflected a belief that radio could serve two masters: the public interest and advertisers.

He hired journalist Paul J. White to run the news division and created a regular news segment called “Something for Everyone.”

Though they differed on how best to achieve it, Democrats and Republicans agreed that radio ought to serve the public interest. In other words, because the airwaves belonged to all Americans, broadcasters had obligations beyond profit. They needed to provide reliable information, platform diverse viewpoints and cover matters of public concern.

In the 1920s, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was charged with formulating federal radio policy. Though he was a staunch, pro-business conservative, Hoover was also an engineer who thought that the radio system should be “free of monopoly” and, like any machine, could be gradually improved so it would better serve democracy.

“The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for the public benefit,” he said in November 1925.

Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 into law. Passed with overwhelming support, it required radio stations to demonstrate a commitment to “public interest, convenience and necessity” in order to receive a license.

Forging the public’s trust

By the time the 1934 Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory agency tasked with licensing broadcasters and enforcing ownership rules, the idea that radio should serve the public had been normalized.

In 1935, Paley made Edward R. Murrow – the man most associated with CBS Radio’s public service mission – head of news programming.

With fascism threatening democracy across Europe, Murrow launched “World News Roundup” in 1938. The longest-running news program in American media, it featured live reports transmitted by shortwave from locations around the world. American audiences huddled around their radios nightly to hear CBS’ reports, which showed how live news could unite a nation and cultivate a richer information ecosystem than the uniform propaganda of Europe’s fascist strongmen.

CBS’ gripping coverage of World War II solidified its importance as an American institution. Murrow’s signature tag lines – “this is London” and, later, “good night and good luck” – helped forge the public’s trust in CBS’ reliable and informative programming.

The dangers of delusion and amusement

After the war, television challenged radio’s dominance. Paley understood that Murrow had built a deep trust among listeners, and he put him in charge of CBS News as the network expanded its programming to TV.

Yet Murrow grew uneasy with shifts in the network’s coverage, which, in his view, increasingly served the economic interests of its owners.

Speaking to the Radio Television News Directors Association in 1958, Murrow lamented how radio and television had forgotten “to operate in the public interest.” He worried that “we have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information” and saw mass media increasingly “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.”

Without serious reporting and civic responsibility as their animating principles, radio and television were losing their democratic utility, becoming mere “wires and lights in a box.”

Corporations gain the upper hand

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many of the rules dating from when CBS Radio News was born, like ownership restrictions and requirements for educational programming, remained on the books.

But during this period, media companies started spending enormous sums of money on donations to legislators who could do their bidding – and capturing the regulatory bodies that were supposed to be holding them accountable. The spirited debates about how radio could better serve democracy largely disappeared. Instead, the conversation shifted to whether government should have any role at all in regulating the media.

Principles that once had broad public support – producing public interest news as a quid pro quo for licensing, limits on foreign ownership and fairness rules that required stations to give equal time to both sides of an issue – faded away.

Any societal obligation outside of earning profit started being described as a threat to the American way of life. Those arguing that media should be regulated like a public utility in a pluralistic democracy were effectively ignored.

After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunication Act, critics argued that industry lobbying had helped dismantle much of the public interest framework that had long governed American broadcasting. The legislation relaxed ownership caps and cross-ownership rules, allowing a small number of large corporations to acquire far more stations and weakening the older public interest obligations tied to broadcast licensing.

Before the act, corporations were limited to owning 40 radio stations. Now, conglomerates like iHeartMedia and Audacy can own thousands.

‘The tube is flickering’

Through it all, CBS Radio News’ top-of-the-hour bulletins remained on the air, a reminder of its original public mission.

Yet increasingly, the deregulated radio ecosystem failed to perform that function.

Back in the 1920s, you could hear editorials arguing that the radio should not be given over to “propagandists, religious zealots and unprincipled persons to grind their own axes.” By the early 2000s, divisive shock jocks and hosts feeding on partisan anger dominated the radio dial.

In a 1938 radio address on CBS’ ethical commitments, Paley argued that “broadcasting as an instrument of American democracy must forever be wholly, honestly and militantly non-partisan.” By 2016, CEO Les Moonves defended CBS’ decision to increase its coverage of President Donald Trump’s spectacularly divisive politics to juice ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Four years later, Trump awarded one of radio’s most polarizing partisan propagandists, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In his second term, Trump has abused his power over the media ecosystem. In 2025, the Trump administration’s FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, with Skydance Media. But it only did so after Paramount Global settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against CBS for $16 million.

Though many talented journalists and producers remain, CBS News’ recently hired editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, has worked to make the network more friendly to the Trump administration. She temporarily shelved a “60 Minutes” segment critical of Trump’s use of El Salvador’s CECOT prison and promoted a friendly town hall with conservative commentator Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk. Ratings at the network have collapsed.

Though Paramount Skydance is using its enormous debt load to justify taking CBS Radio News off the air, the conglomerate is trying to purchase CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a move that would only further the monopolization of the news media.

Americans can’t say Murrow didn’t warn them.

“The tube is flickering,” he said in 1958. And unless Americans reclaim their right to information not colored by profit motive and special interests, “we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”

Matthew Jordan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.