CBS News Radio goes off the air May 22, 2026 — 21 days from this edition. The paper filed yesterday's day-22 entry on the closure and noted that no preservation plan, no archive buyer, and no farewell program had surfaced. [1] Twenty-four hours later, the same line items remain blank. Roughly 700 affiliated stations still face the same minute next month when the network feed terminates and a 99-year-old broadcast service ends.

The carry-forward is the silence. CBS Radio's roots reach to 1927, two decades older than the television operation. [2] The shutdown was confirmed inside Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski's 6% layoff round in March; the May 22 date became public when affiliates were told their contracts would terminate. [3] 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 May 23.

The press-freedom-wartime thread now runs the CBS Radio sign-off date alongside the FCC's eight-station ABC license-renewal cliff (also opening this week), the Stars and Stripes ombudsman firing on day four, and the Voice of America restoration calendar at six weeks. The artifacts are not all the same kind, but they share an absence: a documentary instance of a public-broadcast obligation handed off without a plan. Twenty-one days is enough time to schedule a farewell program. It is also, as the paper has argued for two days now, enough time to not.

What changes today is only the count. What does not change is the line item the affiliates' listeners and the journalists who built the network are waiting for.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York