CBS’s MacFarlane: The Closure of CBS Radio News After 100 Years Is a Brutal and Voluntary Loss

EXCERPT:

MacFARLANE: "The shuttering of CBS Radio News after 99 years is a brutal loss, absolutely brutal and voluntary. It'd be like imploding Wrigley Field or boarding up the Louvre. You're just eliminating history. But history and value is CBS Radio News — I still have the mug — reached 700 affiliates every day. That’s bonkers. 700 communities across America. Basically, the entirety of America could listen to CBS Radio News every hour of every day for 99 years. It was always there. On 9/11, when the towers fell, CBS Radio News down the road was there every hour with the updates. When Covid closed everything down, it didn’t close down CBS Radio News. They were there every hour of every day. There's a reliability to radio that makes it stand apart. TV brings you fame or familiar faces, you know, that’s what you’ll see on television. Social media puts anybody that wants to be on the screen, on the screen. But radio people, they're like your family, you just bond with them. They feel like part of your community, part of your family, in part because of the way the media works. Radio is the most intimate, the most one-on-one medium ever created. It’s why it’s the greatest medium.”