Another Institution Bites the Dust

It was unhappy news though in our absurd age not surprising, I suppose.

WCBS Radio in New York, the originator of all-news broadcasting, will cease to exist before the month is out. Its famous call letters will disappear, replaced by something else. Rather than 24-hour live news, it will become round-the-clock sports discussion of interest primarily to gamblers. Also, there will be many ads for places where gamblers can lose their money. And other vices as well.

The decision came from a company owned by George Soros, the currency trader who has made our cities into the lawless dumps they are today. Did you know that George Soros controls 250 of the country’s largest and most influential broadcast stations?

Lots to discuss, beginning with my personal sadness, because I have some history with New York broadcasting.

My career there began in January 1981, at WOR Radio, at the time the top-rated radio station in the country. I started as a newswriter and editor. Soon, due to society headmistress Jean Harris doing me (though not him) the favor of shooting famed Scarsdale diet doctor Herman Tarnower to death, I was on the air. (The shooting and trial were in Westchester County, where I lived. We weren’t staffing it, but on my days off I’d go to the courthouse and phone in updates; on the days I was at the radio station my girlfriend sat in on the trial. One day the word came from on high: Powell was cleared to go on the air. Thus I got my AFTRA card and became an on-air reporter at the biggest station in the largest market in the country. I still remember the pride I felt in the lockout, “From the Westchester County Courthouse, Dennis Powell, WOR News.” Thanks for your sacrifice, Hy.)

Our principal competition in the news and in the ratings was WCBS. It was the big gun in town, owned as it was by the gigantic Columbia Broadcasting System, headquartered at the second-most famous broadcasting address in New York, 51 West 52^nd^ Street. (The most famous, of course, was 30 Rockefeller Center, home of the National Broadcasting Company and its WNBC, at the time not a big player in the market, though it was of enormous historic significance. In 1988 it gave up its format and its call letters and became WFAN, an all-sports station. Before there was an NBC, the station had been WEAF, for “earth, air, and fire.” The last person on the air at WNBC, before it abandoned its tradition, was the late Alan Colmes, later famous as half of “Hannity and Colmes”on the Fox News Channel, which was itself respectable when he was there.)

In our newsroom, WCBS was the competition. We respected them, we hated them, and yet we were strangely friends. We both had helicopters, and our chopper driver, George Meade, would let the newsroom know when WCBS was in the air, calling their helicopter “football,” because of the shape of the thing and the giant “88” painted on its sides. We were (and what is left of WOR still is) at 710 on the dial; WNBC at 660; WCBS 880; and to be complete WABC was and is at 770.

(If you were to see a list of the people who over the years had daily radio programs in New York, you would be astonished. But I digress.)

We co-existed happily with WCBS. If someone, either them or us, had a mic cable go bad during an assignment the competitor would loan him a replacement.

We would also fight tooth and nail for a scoop.

I remember one day, when I’d taken the subway to cover an arraignment at the Queens Criminal Courthouse. As always happened when I covered a story there, my report ended with my getting tongue-tied on live radio and calling it “Kreens Kwiminal Courthouse.” (Hey. You try it.) Steve Reed, covering the same story for WCBS, thought this was hilarious. He had offered me a ride back to Manhattan, but I had to get out of the “WCBS Mobile Cruiser” as he filed his story, because he’d glance at me and start laughing. CBS had cool toys — he could feed tape from the cassette player in the station wagon’s dashboard. We had subway tokens.

Despite the lack of gadget-filled studios-on-wheels, we consistently won. I remember, have, and can’t find at the moment the full-page New York Times ad which said — I proudly memorized it — “WOR 710 is the #1 radio station in New York. And when you’re #1 in New York, you’re #1 in America. Thank You, New York!”

It didn’t last, and I think a guy named Rick Devlin was to blame. He was the general manager of WOR and he got a big idea: he would spend much of the newsroom budget hiring a big name to read the morning newscast. The big name was one Lou Adler — the news director of WCBS. Not at all liked by us, he was not there long — just long enough for many of us to leave and for the ratings to tank. His time wrecking WOR news was otherwise so undistinguished that it got only passing mention in his obituary.

But he had done much to build WCBS, which was unquestionably the top all-news station in the country. When the morning of September 11, 2001 erupted, you can be sure that every car radio in the northeastern U.S. was tuned to WCBS, “News 88.”

Times have changed, as you may have noticed. Radio is and has for a few decades been in the hands of that unique kind of con artist called the radio consultant. These characters are hired by the likes of Rick Devlin to cook up a plan, usually unsuccessful, to squeeze an extra nickle out of a station, listeners be damned. WNBC is gone. WOR is effectively gone, moved downtown someplace and no longer on the 23^rd^ floor of 1440 Broadway, and now owned by the “I Heart” consortium. Through it all, though not totally immune to the malign touch of the consultant, WCBS cooked along.

It went on the air September 20, 1924, though it didn’t become WCBS until 1946, when the Illinois station that owned the call letters was persuaded, probably via cash transaction, to give them up. It had by then been owned by CBS for more than a decade. On August 28, 1967, the all-news format was introduced. The first anchor that morning was the great Steve Porter. He was followed by a fellow named Charles Osgood Wood. They had to broadcast on their FM station that first day because the night before, during a storm, a stolen airplane had crashed into the tower WCBS shared with WNBC, knocking it down. The tower got fixed and WCBS News 88 was off and running. In 2000 it moved to my old stomping grounds at the CBS Broadcast Center, 524 West 57^th^ Street, by the river, and a decade later it moved downtown someplace.

In 2017, WCBS began to no longer be a CBS-owned station. The split became absolute in 2022 when it was acquired by an outfit called Audacy, which, weirdly, already owned 1010 WINS, the bargain-basement all-news station in New York, the radio equivalent of the Daily News compared to WCBS’s New York Times. I must say here that having both stations owned by the same outfit is, to use the technical term, hinky. Audacy runs about 250 radio stations around the country, some of them very famous.

Like so many big ideas in radio, Audacy went bust, filing for bankruptcy in January of this year. In stepped George Soros nee György Schwartz, the Hungarian-born currencies trader, via $400 million from his Soros Fund Management. The financier of ultra-left-wing causes now controls many of the country’s biggest radio stations.

That’s probably worse even than consultants. It is also bizarre: In the 1980s, General Tire and Rubber, which owned the RKO-General radio and television stations — among them WOR — was forced to sell most of them because the parent company had engaged in some shady business dealings in South America. Now, a George Soros can own much of the broadcast spectrum. Don’t let them tell you that trying to destroy the United States doesn’t pay.

Ah, but as with roaches surviving an atomic bomb, the consultant-programmer class of swamp dweller continues. On Monday, the Soros-beholden Audacy announced that WCBS will be no more, as of August 26. See if you can detect the not-quite-human aspect of the announcement by Audacy official Chris Oliviero: “New York has always been proudly unique in supporting two all-news radio brands, but the news business has gone through significant changes.” Brands? BRANDS?? They’re radio stations, dammit. It reminds me of the otherwise unemployable child of the guy who bought the local newspapers here, when he spoke of “investing in the space.” When someone talks like that, the end is near. When it comes for them, I hope it is painful and prolonged.

Money is at the bottom, middle, and top of it, of course. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sports betting is legal. Almost immediately the cablewaves and airwaves were filled with advertisements for well-financed bookmakers. They’ll advertise anywhere, but the places they like best are sports stations.

There’s no money in news, which is usually bad, while sports — in which dreamers who won’t have George Soros to bail them out when they bankrupt themselves — is a whole nother thing. Audacy already owns the sports station WFAN, the former WNBC, and it is leasing WCBS’s air, now to be called WHSQ, to something called “Good Karma Brands,” who will run ESPN Radio there. It is all beneath contempt, and I hope Good Karma enjoys anything but.

WCBS will have a three-hour goodbye show from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. August 22. You can stream it if you want. But I recommend that you go to this link, scroll to the bottom, and listen to the first hour of all-news radio in the U.S.

It will remind you of how much we’ve lost to the grifters and the whores and the consultants, though I see I have repeated myself.