The final broadcast of CBS News Radio
On inertia, smartphone alerts, and what's being lost from the public interest
The final signoff of CBS News Radio has arrived, and though it’s not the kind of event that resonates with everyone, it’s a passage that remains worthy of note. As one observer noted, among the radio networks in the prime of their influence, CBS was the “serious” one. And though it has been a long time since radio was the predominant medium for news coverage, a combination of inertia and institutional self-regard kept the network serious until the end.
■ As a particularly notable example, the “CBS World News Roundup“ wasn’t necessary, but it was good -- a commute-length radio news broadcast that really did try to capture the world’s stories for a day. It was truly broadcasting in the public interest, and that’s the kind of thing being lost.
■ It says something unflattering about our culture that streaming coverage of sports (utterly soaked in the language of betting) can be found at all hours of the day or night, while one of the few remaining heritage radio news network gets euthanized. The periodicity of radio news -- about 5 minutes at the top of each hour -- is reassuring: It says that we don’t have to be on high alert at all times, and that we can check in for a professional opinion about what’s noteworthy once an hour. Smartphone alerts, by contrast, aren’t designed to keep us calm, but rather to keep users in a heightened state of stimulation at all times.
■ With luck, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction sometime soon. Maybe we’ll recapture the sense that it’s responsible and sanity-preserving to choose to check the news from reputable outlets only periodically, and unplug from the stimulus stream the rest of the time. But as the reputable sources with long histories fade from relevance or are closed down, it becomes harder to have confidence that something good will still be around when that time comes.