Continuous Wave explores radio history, mostly, because it explains so much of what we hear and see today, from popular television to podcasts to online media. But this project is also attracted to human folly and psychodrama (which says something about my disposition). And there’s plenty of folly and psychodrama in the annals of the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS.

Don’t take it from me, take it from the network’s most famous correspondent and news anchor, Edward R. Murrow: “You’re only important around here as long as you’re useful to them, and you will be for a time,” he once told a colleague, according to David Halberstam’s 1979 book The Powers that Be (p. 150). “And when they’re finished they’ll throw you out without another thought.”

Although many people say CBS is now betraying the spirit of Murrow, he might not exactly be surprised by what is happening today, though it surely would make him sad. After the parent company of CBS, Paramount, was sold to Skydance last year with the blessing of the current right-wing US administration, the network is shedding legacy talent and assets at record — and wrecking — speed.

Today is the last for meddlesome late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert on CBS. (Following more than a week of rowdy tributes: a wall-of-dudes episode of Strike Force Five; a mind-meld with predecessor David Letterman to throw furniture/foodstuffs from the roof of CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theater).

In a quieter but no less devastating development, tomorrow (May 22) is the last day that CBS News Radio will be heard at the top of the hour across nearly 700 commercial radio stations nationwide. Meanwhile, correspondents at 60 Minutes are signing off for good, and layoffs are besieging what’s left of the TV side of CBS News.

Perhaps this all seems like a more dismal version of the misery that has beset media all around. But CBS in many ways created the unstable commercial- and personality-driven model of broadcasting that that digital media adopted and now regrets. CBS is the decoder key and worth learning from.

So in recognition of this week’s pathetic milestones, I’ve removed paywalls on four posts I wrote this past year about CBS. Although the network has not been great about keeping its historical archives intact, the place has always been a leaky vessel (see Murrow above), and so it leaves a different kind of record behind: psychodrama!

Enjoy the excerpts below and click over to the full posts if you’d like to read more.

(originally published Jan. 1, 2026)

On September 18, 1927, listeners of 16 radio stations, from the East Coast through Ohio to Chicago, got to hear a special live program emanating from WOR in New York. The new Columbia Chain, a rival to the just-established NBC network, was making its debut. The highlight was the performance of a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.

The debut was not auspicious.

The Columbia network turned into a money pit for its eponymous sponsor, Columbia Phonograph, which quickly lost $100,000 (in 1927 money!) before pulling out. In desperation, the network’s founders turned to wealthy friends in Philadelphia for fresh investment. And one of those friends eventually turned to his in-laws, the Paleys.

The Paleys ran a successful cigar-manufacturing business and had used radio sponsorship to boost sales of their most famous brand, La Palina. Now the family had the option to buy a major stake in the struggling Columbia venture. So they did, and restless heir William “Bill” Paley became president of the network, soon to be renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System. Paley had just turned 27, and he rolled into town with his own valet.

Paley quickly established a reputation as a shrewd media mogul, in part because of ballsy investment deal with Paramount Pictures that, thanks to the changing fortunes of movies and broadcasting during the Great Depression, paid off handsomely. [Irony noted.]

Paley’s reputation was also reinforced by the competent seconds-in-command he hired. He had an eye for people who could accept blame for decisions their boss made, while giving him credit for things that turned out well. All of these men waited for their promised reward — which they did get in compensation, but never in appreciation. 

(Read the rest of “All the King’s Henchmen” here.)

(originally published June 5, 2025)

Edward Murrow was called the “editor” in the intro to [his 1950s CBS-TV show] See It Now. (He was also called “distinguished reporter and news analyst” because they liked to lay it on thick.)

Here’s something else interesting from that intro. It called the show “a document for television, based on the week’s news and told through the actual voices and faces that made the news.”

That word “actual” is a big clue to the innovation that Murrow and [executive producer] Fred Friendly were bringing to broadcasting, and it was so important that the introduction uses the word twice. It goes on: “Now speaking to you from the actual control room of Studio 41 is the editor of See It Now, Edward R. Murrow.”

At which point Murrow swivels to the camera, cigarette in hand, to start the program. He’s in the actual control room so he can call up field reports and interviews on the monitors to his left. These monitors act as props — the field reports quickly materialize and fill our whole screen.

But Murrow has evoked the reportage through this little magic trick. In his cramped control room, surrounded by knobs and cameras, he is both the master of ceremonies and the guy who makes sense of everything at the end with a little homily.

Murrow delivered a banger at the end of A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a famous March 9, 1954 broadcast… Quoth Murrow:

Now, this particular program of Murrow’s was a bit unusual in that it didn’t have any reports from the field. It consisted mostly of clips from speeches and hearings featuring Senator McCarthy railing against this or that menace, a stray cowlick escaping his comb-over to flop against his wide forehead. 

[….] It was a game McCarthy was almost certainly bound to lose. That’s because inside Studio 41, there were no live “guests” — I mean, where would they even fit in there? Other people were always on tape. 

There’s even a moment a couple of minutes into his famous 1954 program when Murrow plays a reel-to-reel tape of McCarthy’s voice, in order to bring us words from a speech that wasn’t filmed.

…Edward Murrow is hosting live. The Senator is 100% pre-recorded and thus already contained.

Immediately after the broadcast, CBS offered to foot the bill for McCarthy to film a half-hour rebuttal, and he took them up on it. The fool.

(Read the full post “A Letter to George Clooney” here.)

(originally published Dec. 4, 2025)

[CBS President] Frank Stanton was the kind of guy who liked to build things, so he took on the task of constructing a contraption that could measure listener reactions in real time. They called it the Program Analyzer. But people at CBS soon called it Little Annie.

Little Annie was based on the same basic technology as a polygraph machine. (By the way, historian Jill Lepore has a fascinating book and podcast episode about one inventor of the polygraph, William Moulton Marston, who was interested in more kinds of poly- than just graph, if you catch my drift).

Anyway, here’s Frank Stanton in an oral history for Columbia University describing how his program analysis machine worked:

Yes, this was perhaps the first “like” button, one provided in a dim room along with cigarettes. 

(Read “The Mysterious Listener” here.)

(originally published Aug. 28, 2025)

“I didn’t leave radio; radio left me,” Norman Corwin often said. But the whole time it was leaving him, he took extensive notes. There’s a lot we can learn from what he noticed.

The moment Corwin felt things unravel happened on a train in July 1948. He was on board the eastbound Santa Fe Chief, a favored cross-country shuttle for the entertainment set. 

Corwin was by then well-known for his incredible, audio-phonic verse and range of work [mostly on CBS]. Actors adored his scripts, and he won prestigious awards and rare prizes.

Corwin radio plays bookended US involvement in World War II: We Hold These Truths, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in late 1941, ran on four radio networks simultaneously and ended with a live speech by President Roosevelt; On a Note of Triumph ran on VE Day, May 8, 1945, and created such a powerful response from listeners that it was published as a book and commemorative album, both of which sold out immediately.

But that evening three years later on the Santa Fe Express, Corwin was not feeling triumphant any more:

Paley was William “Bill” Paley, the head of CBS. Corwin had run into him, along with Paley’s new wife, on the platform in California. It turned out they were all heading to New York on the same train. Paley invited Corwin to lunch in the dining car the following day. 

Bill Paley was a big deal, but not yet the famous head of CBS TV later depicted in countless books, lightly fictionalized exposés, and Broadway plays. Back in 1948, Norman Corwin would have seemed more famous than Bill Paley to most members of the public.

And Bill Paley was not exactly his boss — Corwin was an independent writer who’d brought a ton of prestige and goodwill to the network for a decade. Still, Corwin wasn’t getting commissions like he used to. He sensed that Paley, for all his charm, was jilting him.

Over a salad in the dining car the next day, Paley confirmed his fears. “You know,” he said (according to Corwin, the only source for this conversation), “you’ve done big things that are appreciated by us and by a special audience, but couldn’t you write for a broader public? That’s what we’re going to need more and more. We’ve simply got to face up to the fact that we’re in a commercial business, and it’s getting tougher all the time.”

[….] Corwin wrote and spoke about his encounter with Bill Paley in 1948 not because it ruined his life. But it was emblematic, and meaningful emblems were his stock in trade. He never stopped urging media to embrace the poetic power of the spoken word. He believed the way radio could use words had the potential for reverence, and people deserved that, to participate in making meaning together with the voices they heard.

Like many who came after, Bill Paley sat atop an empire of electrons and turned them into cash. But Norman Corwin knew what they were worth. And so, he teaches us, can we.

(Read the rest of “Poetic Justice” here)

Want more psychodrama? Here’s a post about NBC’s larger-than-life founder, David Sarnoff. And what does the birth of NBC/regulatory love-child ABC also have to do with Life Savers candy? Find out.

And there’s more on CBS: You Burned the City contains excerpts of speeches given by, and in honor of, correspondent Ed Murrow just a few days before the US entered World War II. The words delivered that evening showed off CBS’s commitment to civic discourse at its best, in a way that puts everything happening now to shame.

There are more stories waiting to be told. Help Continuous Wave get back in the archives by becoming a supporting member today:

And thanks for reading to the end. The nicotine-stained ghost of Ed Murrow says don’t ever trust the bastards.