CBS News Radio goes off the air May 22, 2026 — 22 days from this edition. The paper filed yesterday's day-23 entry on the closure and named the affiliate count, not the layoff round, as the fact that travels: roughly 700 stations lose their network feed at the same minute. [1] One day later, no preservation plan has surfaced, no farewell program has been scheduled, and Paramount Skydance has not named a buyer for the rights to the network's nine-decade archive. [2]

The silence is the carry-forward. CBS Radio's roots reach to 1927, two decades older than the television operation. [3] The shutdown was confirmed inside Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski's 6% layoff round; the date became public when affiliates were told their contracts would terminate. The Writers Guild of America East has called the closure the largest single radio-newsroom contraction in modern memory. None of those parties have said what happens to the tape library on the morning of May 23.

The operational reality is concrete. Several affiliates have already told local press they will replace the CBS feed with syndicated talk programming. The farewell program — a tradition for major closing American broadcasters since the end of NBC's daytime radio service — remains unscheduled. Twenty-two days is enough time to produce one. It is also enough time to not.

The paper has watched the press-freedom-wartime thread pile artifacts on the calendar. The CBS Radio sign-off date is a fixed point on it. What is missing is the line item that would tell the affiliates' listeners — and the journalists who built the network — what happens to a 99-year-old broadcast service when it stops broadcasting.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York