page_title: CBS
section_title: CBS launches an independent news division
hierarchical_section_title: CBS / History / Early radio years / CBS launches an independent news division
caption_attribution_description: English: Two CBS engineers set up radio remote in private home, 1937. Original caption: "Engineers prepare for black broadcast. Washington, D.C., Oct. 1. A real fireside chat will be the address of Justice Hugo L. Black to the nation tonight over a coast-to-coast hookup from the home of Claude E. Hamilton in the capital. Radio engineers Jerry Hurlbut and Stanford H. Rose are shown testing the mikes and controls as they set up in the Hamilton living room from where Justice Black will answer the charges that he is a klansman, 10/1/37"
context_page_description: CBS is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network that is the flagship property of the CBS Entertainment Group division of ViacomCBS. The company is headquartered at the CBS Building in New York City, with major production facilities and operations in New York City and Los Angeles.
  CBS is sometimes referred to as the Eye Network, in reference to the company's trademark symbol, in use since 1951. It has also been called the "Tiffany Network", alluding to the perceived high quality of CBS programming during the tenure of William S. Paley. It can also refer to some of CBS's first demonstrations of color television, which were held in a former Tiffany & Co. building in New York City in 1950.
  The network has its origins in United Independent Broadcasters Inc., a radio network created in January 1927 in Chicago by Arthur Judson, a New York City talent agent. It was later that year, in April, that the Columbia Phonograph Company, parent of the Columbia record label, invested in the network, resulting in its re-branding to the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.
context_section_description: The extraordinary potential of radio news showed itself in 1930, when CBS suddenly found itself with a live telephone connection to a prisoner called "The Deacon" who described, from the inside and in real time, a riot and conflagration at the Ohio Penitentiary; for CBS, it was "a shocking journalistic coup". Yet as late as 1934, there was still no regularly scheduled newscast on network radio: "Most sponsors did not want network news programming; those that did were inclined to expect veto rights over it." There had been a longstanding wariness between radio and the newspapers as well; the papers had rightly concluded that the upstart radio business would compete with them in both advertising dollars and news coverage. By 1933 the newspapers began fighting back, many no longer publishing radio schedules for readers' convenience, or allowing their own news to be read on the air for radio's profit. Radio, in turn, pushed back when urban department stores, newspapers' largest advertisers and themselves owners of many radio stations, threatened to withhold their ads from print. A short-lived truce in 1933 even saw the papers proposing that radio be forbidden from running news before 9:30 a.m., and then only after 9:00 p.m., and that no news story could air until it was 12 hours old.
  It was in this climate that Paley set out to "enhance the prestige of CBS, to make it seem in the public mind the more advanced, dignified and socially aware network". He did it by sustaining programming of the New York Philharmonic, Norman Corwin's drama, and an in-house news division to gather and present news, free of fickle suppliers such as the newspapers or wire services. In the fall of 1934, CBS launched an independent news division, shaped in its first years by Paley's vice-president, former New York Times columnist Ed Klauber, and news director Paul White. Since there was no blueprint or precedent for real-time news coverage, early efforts of the new division used the shortwave link-up CBS had been using for five years to bring live feeds of European events to its American air.
  A key early hire was Edward R. Murrow in 1935; his first corporate title was Director of Talks. He was mentored in microphone technique by Robert Trout, the lone full-time member of the News Division, and quickly found himself in a growing rivalry with his boss White. Murrow was glad to "leave the hothouse atmosphere of the New York office behind" when he was dispatched to London as CBS's European Director in 1937, when the growing Hitler menace underscored the need for a robust European Bureau. Halberstam described Murrow in London as "the right man in the right place in the right era". Murrow began assembling the staff of broadcast journalists who would become known as the "Murrow Boys", including such men as William L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Bill Downs, and Eric Sevareid. They were "in [Murrow's] own image, sartorially impeccable, literate, often liberal, and prima donnas all". They covered history in the making, and sometimes made it themselves. On March 12, 1938, Hitler boldly annexed nearby Austria and Murrow and Boys quickly assembled coverage with Shirer in London, Edgar Ansel Mowrer in Paris, Pierre Huss in Berlin, Frank Gervasi in Rome and Trout in New York. This bore the now-ubiquitous News Round-Up format.
  Murrow's nightly reports from the rooftops during the dark days of the London Blitz galvanized American listeners. Even before Pearl Harbor, the conflict became "the story of the survival of Western civilization, the most heroic of all possible wars and stories. He was indeed reporting on the survival of the English-speaking peoples." With his "manly, tormented voice", Murrow contained and mastered the panic and danger he felt, thereby communicating it all the more effectively to his audience. Using his trademark self-reference "this reporter", he did not so much report news as interpret it, combining simplicity of expression with subtlety of nuance. Murrow himself said he tried "to describe things in terms that make sense to the truck driver 
caption: CBS News engineers prepare a remote: Justice Hugo Black's 1937 denial of Ku Klux Klan ties.
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