Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at the history of WCBS, the all-news station. We’ll also look at Justice Juan Merchan’s third rejection of Donald Trump’s move for him to recuse himself from Trump’s case.
WCBS Newsradio 880 will become WHSQ-AM, an all-sports station, on Aug. 26. If WCBS were to last two more days, it would have been a news outlet for 57 years.
On Aug. 28, 1967, the day Newsradio 880 made its debut, a stolen plane put the station itself in the news.
In recent years, as the digital world of podcasters and streaming services has cut into the audience of radio stations everywhere, WCBS-AM has held on to a loyal base of stubbornly analog New Yorkers. As my colleague Corey Kilgannon wrote, they are mourning the loss of one of the city’s last mostly all-news stations. Not even WCBS has been broadcasting all news all the time. It began carrying New York Mets games in 2019. They will continue on WHSQ.
Officials with Audacy, the broadcast conglomerate that owns WCBS-AM, blamed the switch on “headwinds facing local journalism nationwide.” And the change will not deprive radio listeners of their news fix: Audacy also owns WINS, the other all-news station in New York. Since the fall of 2022, WINS, which has a larger audience, has been broadcasting on FM as well as AM.
WINS pioneered the all-news format in 1965. WCBS followed in 1967, dropping its middle-of-the-road music format.
The first day of the all-news format on WCBS, on the Monday before Labor Day, did not go according to plan. Listeners who tuned in to 880 on their AM dials heard nothing. There was nothing on the 8s, to borrow a slogan the station used later on.
The WCBS-AM transmitter had been knocked out the day before. “Bewildered listeners twisted their dials, wondering what had happened” when the station went quiet at 4:21 p.m. on a stormy Sunday afternoon, The New York Times said.
It turned out that a single-engine plane had been fighting its way through heavy rain when it slammed into the transmitter on High Island, off the Bronx. Two bodies were found in the water.
The plane was leased to a company that operated charter flights from La Guardia Airport and that had grounded its fleet on Sunday morning because of the bad weather.
But that afternoon only five planes were parked in what should have been a line of six. “We called all over,” an official of the charter company was quoted as saying, and found that the plane in question had been in East Hampton, on the East End of Long Island. “We filed a stolen-from-airport report,” the official said.
In the control room at WCBS-AM, Jerry LeBow, a 22-year-old engineer, understood immediately that something had gone wrong. “When the station goes off the air, alarms and buzzer and bells are ringing,” he told me five years ago. “I’m supposed to put this thing back on the air.” He started flipping switches and pushing buttons. “Nothing I did seemed to work,” he said.
“One of the older guys pushed me aside: ‘I just got a call from Bill Paley. He’s going to fire us all,’” LeBow said, referring to William Paley, then the chairman of CBS. The other engineer “couldn’t do anything, either,” LeBow said. “He got really frustrated.”
After a few minutes, a red phone in the control room rang. “This is the F.A.A. tower at La Guardia Airport,” the voice at the other end said. “We just lost a plane on radar in the vicinity of High Island. Do you have anybody out there with eyeballs who can tell us if there’s a plane in the water?”
Another engineer was sent out, and after about an hour he called and reported that both the main transmitter and an adjacent backup transmitter had been destroyed.
WCBS-AM was off the AM band for nearly 29 hours. The station’s first morning of all-news programming was carried only on WCBS-FM. FM radio had not caught on yet: Most car radios were AM-only.
So the all-news debut was muted. The first stories were read by Steve Porter, who had been the first anchor when a station in Philadelphia adopted an all-news format in 1965. He was at the microphone starting at 5:30 a.m. Also anchoring that morning was Charles Osgood, who later became known for his “Osgood File” segments on CBS Radio.
The station finally returned to AM, with a 10,000-watt transmitter from WLIB-AM, at 9:27 p.m. on Aug. 28. A new permanent tower was in place and operating at full power in little more than three weeks.
The new all-news format on WCBS-AM eventually developed a following, but in mid-September, Time magazine referred to the station’s “teething troubles.”
“WCBS should grow out of its pains,” Time said, even as it complained of “call letteritis” — when announcers and reporters said “WCBS” as they introduced their reports, as they ended their reports, and as they went to segments with weather, traffic and sports.
WCBS countered with an editorial. “Every radio station identifies itself on the air,” the station said on the air, adding that in the issue with the article that mentioned WCBS, “Time identified itself at least 81 times.”
Weather
Prepare for a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon, with temperatures in the high 80s. The evening is mostly clear, with temperatures in the low 70s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Feast of the Assumption).
The latest New York news
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Columbia president resigns: Nemat Shafik quit after months of fury over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. She said she was leaving to lead a review of the British government’s approach to international development.
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Disney’s defense for a wrongful-death lawsuit: Jeffrey Piccolo sued over the death of his wife from an allergic reaction to food served at a Disney resort restaurant. Disney wants the case settled by arbitration, saying that by signing up for its Disney+ streaming service and by buying tickets to the Epcot resort, Mr. Piccolo agreed to settle disputes out of court.
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Hate crime charged: A Jewish man in Brooklyn was arrested and charged with attempted murder and hate crimes after repeatedly attacking his Muslim neighbor over several months, according to a criminal complaint.
Arts & Culture
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Bronx Museum head steps down: Klaudio Rodriguez is leaving his position at the museum, which recently began a $33 million expansion and renovation project.
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A new arts venue upstate: The Mill, an arts center with galleries and a performance space in an old flour mill, opened over the weekend. Its owners hope it sparks a “ripple effect.”
Judge denies Trump’s latest recusal bid
Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over Donald Trump’s criminal fraud trial, said for the third time that he would not take himself off the case.
Merchan, in a decision dated Tuesday, rebuked Trump’s lawyers for asserting that the judge had a distant connection to Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent in the November election. The judge said that Trump’s filing seeking a recusal was “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims.”
Merchan also dismissed the idea that there was a conflict of interest with his daughter, Loren Merchan, a political consultant who, Trump’s lawyers argued, “has a longstanding relationship with Harris.”
Merchan said that some of the arguments in the Trump filing “appear to be nothing more than an attempt to air grievances against this court’s rulings.”
Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the hush-money case that led to Trump’s conviction in May on charges of falsifying business records, had called the request for Merchan to recuse himself “a vexatious and frivolous attempt to relitigate” an issue that the judge had already dismissed not once but twice.
Underscoring his apparent frustration with repetitive filings from Trump’s lawyers, Merchan wrote that “this court now reiterates for the third time, that which should already be clear — innuendo and mischaracterizations do not a conflict create. Recusal is therefore not necessary, much less required.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Closing time
Dear Diary:
Thirty minutes before the SoHo restaurant where I work was to close, a young man and his partner walked in and sat at one of my tables.
He told me he had a shrimp allergy, and I told him which dishes to avoid. He was kind and soft-spoken, and they got up to leave after an hour.
The next week, I was walking down Orchard Street when I heard someone yelling. Looking across the street, I saw the soft-spoken customer.
“Server!” he yelled, smiling. “Server!”
“Shrimp allergy!” I yelled back.
— Sofia Anna Gatmon-Sandrock
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post WCBS Had a Dramatic Start. Now It’s Coming to an End. appeared first on New York Times.
