CBS News Radio goes off the air May 22 — twenty days from this edition. Friday's paper filed the day-21 entry and noted that no preservation plan, no archive buyer, and no farewell program had surfaced. Twenty-four hours later, the same line items remain blank. Roughly 700 affiliated stations still face the same minute when the network feed terminates and a 99-year-old broadcast service ends. [1][2]

Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski's March memo cited "a shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities." [3] Neither phrase addresses the tape library. CBS Radio's roots reach to 1927, two decades older than the television operation; the question on May 23 is whether the recordings live inside Paramount Skydance's media holdings, transfer to a public archive, or sit in a freight elevator until someone bills storage. The Writers Guild of America East has called the closure the largest single radio-newsroom contraction in modern memory. None of the parties have answered the archive question on the record.

The silence is the artifact. The press-freedom-wartime thread now runs the CBS Radio sign-off date alongside the FCC's eight-station ABC license-renewal cliff (a 30-day window), the Stars and Stripes ombudsman firing on day five, and the Voice of America restoration calendar at six weeks. The four pieces share an absence: a documentary instance of a public-broadcast obligation handed off without a plan. Twenty days is enough time to schedule a farewell program. It is also, as the paper has argued for three days now, enough time not to.

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

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin