May 11, 2026 - Trump Rejects Iran Peace Reply

CBS News Radio signs off on May 22 after nearly 100 years, and I can’t let the moment pass without a Philadelphia angle, because there is one — and it goes all the way back to the origins of CBS itself.

William S. Paley grew up in Philadelphia. His father ran the Congress Cigar Company here, and the family’s La Palina brand became part of an early and important experiment in radio advertising. In the 1920s, Paley’s sponsorship of programming on Philadelphia radio helped teach him what broadcasting could do for a business. He later said that experience opened his eyes to radio’s power.

A few years later, Paley bought the struggling network that would become CBS and helped turn it into one of the great institutions in American media. Philadelphia was part of that story from the beginning.

And so was WCAU, the great Philadelphia station that became one of CBS’s important local partners. The WCAU building at 1622 Chestnut Street was also the first building in the United States constructed expressly for radio broadcasting — with eight studios, including one large enough for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Paley called it “the finest thing of its kind in the country.”

At the dedication of WCAU’s new City Line Avenue facility in 1952, Paley returned to Philadelphia and said, “It is with no small amount of personal pride that today I return to Philadelphia, the city where I grew up, to pay my respects to WCAU, an old friend.”

I worked at that station. I walked those halls. We had different call letters but the locals would still say to me, “oh, you’re on WCAU”. The line from a cigar company on Market Street to Edward R. Murrow reporting from Vienna is a straight one, and it runs through Philadelphia.

Now it’s over. CBS executives cite the changing way people get their news, increasingly through social media, and the harsh economic realities of the business. Fair enough. But Paley built an empire on the audacious idea that Americans deserved to hear the world as it happened, in real time, with no filter. He learned that lesson here.

Good night, and good luck.

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