The Old Blog in the Desert

There was a time in this country when a man could sit still, do nothing of consequence, and yet know everything worth knowing, provided he had a radio and the good sense to turn it on at the top of the hour. That arrangement has now been judged inefficient, and so CBS News has announced it will shut down its radio service after nearly a century, which is a respectable age for anything except a tortoise or a grudge.

The service began in 1927, back when news traveled at the speed of a voice, and people trusted it on account of having no alternative. A young William S. Paley got his start there, and Edward R. Murrow later spoke into that same invisible crowd from London during the war, proving that a calm voice could cross an ocean and still carry authority.

It was a fine system. You heard the news, you considered it, and you went about your day without arguing with strangers.

Now the thing is to be put down on May 22, not because it forgot how to speak, but because fewer people remembered how to listen. CBS says the decision comes from “changing programming strategies” and “challenging economic times,” which is the modern way of explaining that the audience has wandered off and taken the money with it.

Radio, once the king of the hill, has been steadily pushed downhill by television, and then shoved the rest of the way by the Internet, where every man may have his own broadcast and most of them ought not. Folks who still want to hear the news now prefer it dressed up as a podcast, which is radio that has learned to knock politely before entering.

The peculiar part is that CBS News Radio still supplies some 700 stations, which suggests it was not entirely dead, only unfashionable, which is a far more serious condition in our time. There is nothing so mortal as a thing that has gone out of style.

At the helm of this decision is CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who has made something of a reputation for stirring the pot and then asking why it boils. She has invoked Walter Cronkite as a symbol of “old thinking,” which is a bold maneuver, akin to improving a church by suggesting the pews have been sitting too long.

She has also promised stories that “surprise and provoke,” including the newsroom itself, which is a dangerous ambition. A newsroom provoked is liable to start producing news about itself, and no good ever comes of that.

Meanwhile, the front page of CBS News did not immediately carry word of its own radio service’s demise, which is either an oversight or a perfect summary of the situation.

And so another old institution tips its hat and exits, not with a bang but with a memo. It leaves behind a century of voices, a habit of listening, and the faint suspicion that progress has improved everything except our attention spans.

If there is a lesson, it is this: the news has not disappeared, only the patience required to receive it.