CBS News Radio enters T-minus 14 today on its way to a May 22 final broadcast, ending a 99-year-old service that distributes news to roughly 700 affiliated stations. [1] Seventeen days have passed since editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski announced the closure — and as the paper's Thursday brief on T-15 and Day 16 of silence said, no buyer, no preservation plan, and no farewell program has been named for the Murrow archive. [2]

The Writers Guild of America, which represents the radio team through its East and West divisions, called the closure "the recklessness and greed" of CBS News bosses, the largest single radio-newsroom contraction in the guild's recent record, while Weiss told staff "we did everything we could" to find a "viable solution" — adding "the financials made it impossible" — language carried verbatim through the March 20 memo. [1] [2]

A 99-year-old broadcast service — the home of Edward R. Murrow's London-rooftop dispatches and the longest-running daily newscast in the United States — does not lapse without an archive disposition, a brand acquisition, or a closing program unless the institutional decision is to let it end without ceremony. Fourteen days, and the recordings are still in the building.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York