Origins

The UIB network went on the air on 18 September 1927 with a string of 16 radio stations in 11 states. The network was not well financed, however, losing more than $200,000 in its first year of operation. In order to survive, UIB arranged for backing by the financially strong Columbia Phonograph Company, a leader in the record-pressing business. Columbia bought into UIB for $163,000. Urn, in turn, changed the name of its broad­ cast arm to the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting Company. Later, when the network continued to sustain substantial losses, Columbia Phonograph withdrew from the network and took free broadcast time as payment for what it was owed.

One of the early advertisers on Urn was the Congress Cigar Company, which produced and aired The La Palina Smoker on the network. The musical program, put together by William Paley (the son of the company's owner) and named after one of its cigars, proved quite a successful advertising tool for the company, doubling sales of the brand in less than six months. Paley was delighted with the results of the program and became fascinated with the radio medium. He spent a great deal of time on his project and learned all that he could about radio and the UIB network. Although UIB was losing money, Paley felt the network had a future, and eventually he decided to buy it. On 25 September 1928, the 27-year-old Paley made it official, purchasing the UIB network for a reported $500,000 of his own money. His father soon bought into the network for $100,000 as a show of support for his son's undertaking.

Paley saw that expansion was a must for his fledgling net­ work and quickly renegotiated the contracts UIB had with its affiliates to achieve three goals: (1) to lower the amount that the network paid stations for the broadcast time they provided; (2) to ensure a long-term association with the stations; and (3) to make sure that UIB was the only network carried by each affiliate. The stations were happy with the arrangement, because UIB was able to hire talent not available to them and to provide better and more programs than the stations could produce themselves locally.

With his existing affiliates taken care of, Paley invited other stations, mainly in the South, to join his new network with contracts similar to those he had just renegotiated. Twelve new stations joined. He later gained a few more affiliates in the Midwest, bringing the UIB network to 48 stations in 42 cities, but none on the West Coast.

By December 1928 UIB was broadcasting 21 hours a week from leased facilities at WABC in New York City and WOR in Newark, Delaware, and it desperately needed a station of its own from which to produce programs. For that purpose, Paley bought WABC in New York for $390,000, after selling shares in the network and investing another $200,000 of his own. WABC (which became WCBS in 1946) thus became the network's first company-owned station.

When Paley had taken over Urn three months earlier, it consisted of three companies: UIB, which supplied the airtime; the Columbia Broadcasting System (the old phonograph company unit), which sold the time to sponsors; and a unit that supplied programs. When Columbia Phonograph left UIB, it insisted that the word phonograph be removed from the name of the broadcast arm of the network but allowed UIB to keep the Columbia portion. As the on-air part of UIB, the Columbia Broadcasting System was what listeners were familiar with. To preserve this name recognition with radio audiences, Paley reorganized UIB, doing away with the broadcasting unit as a separate entity and merging all three UIB companies into one, named the Columbia Broadcasting System, Incorporated (CBS). In the first six months of 1929 advertising sales picked up at CBS, and the movie studios began to take an interest in the new network. Just as the movie industry was to fear the impact television would have on theatergoing decades later, the industry was leery of radio broadcasting and decided that a link with the growing medium would be a good financial move. After lengthy negotiations, Paramount paid $5 million for half of CBS in June 1929. As part of the sales contract, the studio agreed to buy back the stock it transferred to CBS to make its 50 percent purchase if CBS earned $2 million within the next two years. Incredibly, CBS met the goal and bought out Paramount, even though the country was then in the depths of the Great Depression.

In 1929 CBS signed the Don Lee group of stations as network affiliates, giving CBS a West Coast link and making it a truly nationwide network. This was also the year it began its first daily news program and its first regular program of political analysis. Late in the year, the network moved into its newly completed headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York with 60 affiliates under contract and annual advertising sales of $4 million.

Development

  During the 1930s and 1940s, CBS radio grew from infancy to maturity through a process of trial and error. Programs, largely music, variety, and comedy at first, increased in variety to include drama, soap opera, audience participation and quiz shows and, by the late 1930s, fledgling news efforts.

Early in the decade, with 400 employees in his employ at CBS, William Paley hired a new assistant, Edward Klauber, a former New York Times editor who was to become the number­ two man at CBS. Another addition to the CBS staff was Paul White, a wire-service reporter who established strong journalistic standards and ethics for the new CBS news organization.

Paley was quick to recognize that growth and revenue for CBS could only come by obtaining new talent and programs to offer to sponsors, and he became adept at finding and signing performers for radio shows. His first big talent coup was to get Will Rogers, America's most popular philosopher­ comedian, to agree to do a 13-week series for CBS in the spring of 1930. With Rogers aboard, Paley was soon able to woo comedians Fred Allen, George Burns, and Jack Benny to CBS radio, as well as Morton Downey, Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, and the Mills Brothers, all of whom went on to great success and fame.

CBS acquired its second station, WBBM in Chicago, in 1931 and began laying claim to being the number-one news network by virtue of the number of news bulletins it was airing. The network also began airing the March of Time, a weekly dramatization of the major news events of the previous week that was sponsored by Time magazine. Although considered melodramatic by some, the program became very popular and remained on CBS until 1937, when it moved to NBC.

Classical music programs were also quite popular in the early 1930s, and CBS signed the New York Philharmonic for Sunday afternoon broadcasts. In addition, the network formed its own Columbia Symphony Orchestra and presented thousands of programs of classical music in the years that followed. Another popular type of program, which emerged on CBS and NBC in the early 1930s and would enjoy loyal audiences for nearly three decades, was the daily romance serial. Sponsored by the giant soap firms of the day, such as Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers, the shows became a part of the daily lives of housewives across the country.

     In 1933, just as CBS became the largest network with 91 affiliates, a high-stakes battle broke out between the radio and newspaper industries that threatened the network's news function. The conflict grew out of radio's steady rise in popularity, which caused newspaper publishers to fear that the new medium was siphoning off advertising revenue and news audiences. The American Newspaper Publishers Association voted not to print the radio industry's daily program schedules in their papers except as paid advertising. The publishers next pressured the newswire services to stop serving radio stations and networks.

     Left without wire-service news, CBS, with the help of sponsorship from General Mills, formed its own news-gathering organization, the Columbia News Service, and placed bureaus in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It also lined up correspondents as "stringers" in nearly every major American city and negotiated exchange agreements with a number of overseas news agencies in an effort to keep news flowing to the radio audiences. Paul White and his staff prepared three news programs each day at CBS, many times with stories the papers did not yet have. By the time the press-radio war ended some time later, CBS had established a strong commitment to providing news and information to America, a commitment that remains at the core of its modern-day radio offerings.

     CBS's American School of the Air was a noncommercial supplement to regular classroom instruction, complete with a teacher's manual. The program featured geography, history, English, music, and drama for young people. It was regularly heard by 6 million children, but it was not able to make CBS the most popular network. During the 1934-35 broadcast season, radio's top five programs were all on NBC.

     With 91 stations, CBS had more affiliates than NBC, but it continued to trail NBC in popularity. New programs were produced, and a number of policy changes were made during 1935 in an effort to move the network into the top spot. CBS established standards for the amount of advertising time it would permit per program and for the type of products that it would and would not advertise. Standards were also set that dealt with "fairness and balance" in all news and public information programs.

     The extra effort seemed to pay off when, by 1936-37, radio's top five programs were on CBS. This was due largely, however, to the fact that the network had enticed three of NBC's most popular entertainers to the network: variety show host Major Bowes, singer Al Jolson, and comedian Eddie Cantor. Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour was the most popular program of the day. CBS also soon took the Lux Radio Theater from NBC.

     In an effort to serve as many audiences as possible, CBS also began to present the Church of the Air on Sundays and formed an advisory board to set policy for its educational programs and to choose shows suitable for children. In addition, it formed the Columbia Workshop in 1936 as an experimental theater of the air. CBS kept this program unsponsored to give it freedom and a chance to pioneer new radio techniques, especially in sound, electronic effects, and music, and many of the ideas the Workshop perfected later became broadcast industry standards. With many of its scripts written by the best-known writers of the day, such as Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw, and William Saroyan, the program achieved great critical acclaim.

     Late in 1936, CBS established a base of operations in Hollywood in order to be able to originate radio shows from the West Coast. The move allowed the network to better serve that region and its time zone and gave CBS more access to Hollywood stars.

     As the signs of war grew in Europe in 1937, Edward Klauber decided that CBS needed a European director, and the job went to Edward R. Murrow. Once overseas, Murrow hired journalist William L. Shirer, and the pair set about lining up cultural events, concerts, and other programs for CBS. When German troops entered Austria in 1938, Shirer, then in Vienna, flew to London to get the story out, and Murrow went to Austria. Shirer went on the air for CBS from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) studios in London, and Murrow sent a shortwave broadcast from Vienna reporting the German takeover of Austria. The effort was the beginning of CBS's exemplary war coverage. Continuing to report from Europe, Murrow and Shirer put together the CBS World News Roundup, the first round-robin international radio news broadcast, with Murrow reporting from Vienna; Shirer from London; and other newsmen in Paris, Berlin, and Rome.

     In the late 1930s CBS bought Columbia Records (the company from which it got its name) and opened its new $1.75 million Columbia Square studio/office complex on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. The network also continued to give its growing audience exciting entertainment programs while providing increasing amounts of news and information.

The War Years

     The CBS foreign news staff grew from 3, including Murrow and Shirer, to 14, and then to 60 in 1941 as the United States entered the war. Of the war years, CBS President William Paley, who became the Deputy Chief of the Office of Psychological Warfare under General Dwight Eisenhower, later noted,

[W]e adopted war themes on many of our programs. In dramatic shows, characters met wartime problems; the American School of the Air brought war news, information, and instruction to children; Country Journal gave farmers help in solving wartime agricultural problems; the Garden Gate promoted Victory gardens; Church of the Air broadcast talks by chaplains. There were also many new series exclusively about the war: They Live Forever, The Man Behind the Gun, Our Secret Weapon (Paley, 1979).

     Kate Smith also conducted hugely successful war bond drives, and some CBS company-owned stations began a 24- hour-a-day schedule, serving as part of an air raid defense system and providing entertainment for defense workers on the overnight shift. CBS's foreign correspondents were its stars of the air. Edward R. Murrow became a hero, even before the United States entered the war, through a series of "rooftop" broadcasts during the 1940 blitz in London; William L. Shirer covered the surrender of France to Germany at Compiegne; Larry Lesueur provided regular shortwave reports from Moscow; and Howard K. Smith provided coverage from Berlin. Others were stationed throughout Europe and in North Africa and Asia.

     Paul White oversaw the international news organization on a daily basis with the help of a news team of some 50 members, including a staff of shortwave listeners who kept him abreast of what was happening around the world. Many of the team's members went on to achieve individual fame as writers and commentators: Eric Sevareid, Robert Trout, Charles Col­ lingwood, John Daly, Howard K. Smith, and of course Edward R. Murrow all became well known and gave CBS News great credibility.

     In 1943 CBS acquired WCBS-FM in New York, its first FM radio station, and WBBM-FM in Chicago. It also lost its number-two man when CBS Vice President Ed Klauber suffered a heart attack and resigned.

     On 6 June 1944, CBS went on the air at 12:30 A.M. to begin special coverage of the D-Day invasion, utilizing several of its commentators in New York, print reports from Washington and overseas, and live transmissions from London. Additional coverage was provided by correspondents in other European capitals, who kept the listeners updated on the progress of the invasion, and CBS's Charles Collingwood, who crossed the English Channel in an LST to report on the invasion from the beach at Normandy.

     Between 7 December 1941 and 2 September 1945, the day the Japanese surrendered, CBS broadcast 35,700 wartime news and entertainment programs, including Norman Cor­ win's commemorative show On a Note of Triumph, which aired at the end of hostilities in Europe. A similar program, entitled 14 August, was aired following the Japanese surrender.

Postwar Transitions

     As the war ended, Frank Stanton, who had been hired in the 1930s as a research specialist to determine CBS listenership, became the network's president; William Paley moved up to become chairman of the board; and Edward R. Murrow was promoted to vice president and director of news and public affairs. By this time, CBS had once again fallen behind in the ratings battle, as 12 of the top 15 radio shows were on NBC.

     By the end of 1947, CBS had put together 36 radio programs, but few were sponsored. It also established a news documentary unit to look at the subjects that were most affecting Americans at the time. In addition, Murrow resigned as a CBS vice president and returned to the air with Hear It Now, a talking history of World War II that evolved into the later television news-documentary program See It Now. As it gained popularity, the documentary became a mainstay of CBS programming. CBS also joined the other networks in providing live broadcasts of hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which looked into the alleged presence of communist sympathizers in the motion picture industry.

     The following year, CBS increased sponsorship for its own shows to 29, and 2 of the programs became among the nation's 10 most popular: My Friend Irma and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts Near the end of the decade, CBS tax attorneys discovered a way for radio stars to save tax money by selling their programs as "properties," and CBS was able to "raid" the most popular NBC programs, including Amos 'n' Andy and Jack Benny. In January 1949 CBS signed other NBC stars: Bing Crosby; comedians Red·Skelton, Edgar Bergen, George Burns and Gra­ cie Allen, Ed Wynn, and Groucho Marx; singers Al Jolson and Frank Sinatra; and band leader Fred Warning. Soon, CBS had 12 of the Hooperating's "First 15," 16 of Nielsen's "Top 20," and an average audience rating that was 12 percent larger than that of any other network. CBS was definitely number one in American broadcasting. By the late 1940s, CBS and its rivals were able to use money made in radio to fund progress in television, with CBS allocating $60 million to that cause.

Decline of CBS Radio Network

     By the end of 1955, television's ability to attract radio's evening audience became clear when the Nielsen ratings listed no night-time programs among radio's top 10. Searching for a way to keep radio audiences, CBS beefed up its news offerings and premiered the CBS Radio Workshop as a revival of the earlier Columbia Workshop. It showcased some of the best talent of the day and used exceptional imagination and creativity in providing critically acclaimed but unsponsored radio drama. Between 1957 and 1960, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, and Amos 'n' Andy left the air; CBS radio shortened its schedule and turned over more time to the affiliates; and radio stations across the country began to offer more music and less network programming.

     By 1960 all three radio networks hit bottom financially, losing 75 percent of the sales they had had in 1948. CBS began to offer even more news, sports, and information programming, ​​and in November 1960 it canceled its last surviving soap operas, putting an end to a chapter of radio history and relinquishing the genre to television.

     As the 1960s progressed, CBS made new arrangements with its affiliates that allowed them to put "packages" of network programs together to meet their needs rather than having to take all the network offerings. With the move, profitability returned, and CBS radio changed fundamentally. No longer would the network be able to tell its affiliates what it would offer them; CBS would instead have to ask the stations what they needed and try to provide it. In 1974 CBS decided to hire E.G. Marshall to host the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in an attempt to reintroduce radio drama and the feel of programs from the golden age of radio. The hour-long show, which was run seven days a week using new scripts and some old production formulas, received mixed reviews, and many affiliates declined to carry it or aired it outside of prime time. It was clear that news, sports, and information programs were all stations wanted from the networks, and CBS vowed to provide it through its strong network news division. The decision has remained in place for nearly three decades.

     Today CBS News serves both radio and television station affiliates. On the radio side, there are two entities, CBS Radio News and CBS Radio Sports, that produce news, information, and sports programming for distribution to more than 1500 stations through Westwood One, a program syndication company.

     CBS Radio News provides stations in nearly every major market with hourly newscasts, instant coverage of breaking stories, special reports, updates, features, customized reports, and news feed material that alerts the stations receiving CBS material to what will be available to them in the following hours. Among the CBS Radio News productions is the World News Roundup, first broadcast in 1940 and said to be the longest-running newscast in America. CBS Radio Sports provides the affiliated stations with regular sportscasts, customized reports, features, and sporting events coverage.

     Early in 2000, CBS merged with Viacom Inc., a global media company with interests in broadcast and cable television, radio, outdoor advertising, online entities, and other media-related fields. Viacom's holdings include MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET, Paramount Pictures, Viacom Outdoor, UPN, TV Land, The New TNN, CMT: Country Music Television, Showtime, Blockbuster, and Simon & Schuster.

     As part of the merger, Viacom also became the parent company of the CBS-owned Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, which operates more than 180 radio stations, the majority of which are in the nation's largest markets. Infinity manages and holds an equity position in the syndicator Westwood One, which is the major CBS radio program distributor.