Excuse this self-indulgence, but I feel as if I’m losing a very good and very old friend.
From the time I was in high school, all-news WCBS-AM, 880 Radio was a steady and perhaps career-inspiring stop. News, weather, traffic, sports and well-written, thoughtful features — one-stop news shopping.
In college, deep in southwestern Pennsylvania, I could pick up 880 every night. It was my nightly connection with what was going on at home.
In the decades since, 880’s reliability and credibility sustained it as a first-stop, last-stop spot on the car radio. After the car started, the next thing heard was all-news 880; didn’t have to turn it on or tune it in.
As conditioned reflexes go, this was a good one.
But lately, and, perhaps, inevitably — given that commercial TV and radio news divisions have become greater promotional tools of the corporations that own them — I sense WCBS slipping away.
It seems to have slowly and intentionally been diminished as a news station in order to promote all things CBS. The trust hasn’t been totally betrayed, but it’s eroding — much like almost everything else once proudly known as journalism.
Last week, what was presented in mid-day by all-news WCBS as an unusually lengthy “news” report, was nothing even close. It was a CBS TV News promo poorly posed as news. Replete with sound bites, it was an infomercial for the reprise of the late Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person.” this time hosted by Charlie Rose and Lara Logan.
It was as insulting as, I suppose, it was inevitable. And from what I’ve read about Murrow, he’d have been furious.
The ugly, transparent service to networks’ corporate fatherlands — the kind that now so often reduces “60 Minutes” to a CBS shopping catalog — has infected All-News 88. It’s as if the station is being forced to surrender by its own generals, as if it’s an admission that the station is no longer good enough to succeed by what made it successful.
WCBS-880 is growing top-heavy with desperate contests and self-laudatory copy, all of it making less room for news.
Reports from reporters in the field seem fewer and less newsy, unless asking motorists how they feel about being stuck in traffic and dispatching reporters to Home Depots to check on the sale of shovels before snowstorms passes for news.
What’ll be heard and seen on WCBS-Ch. 2 News or CBS Network News — or already was seen and heard on either or both — now supplants other news that WCBS News Radio might report. WCBS-880 now often sounds more like a franchise than a go-and-get-it news station.
More than ever there seem to be reminders — reminders that come close to begging — to stay tuned to WCBS, perhaps for self-inflicted reasons.
Even the commercials seem to have grown seedier, loaded with dubious claims and solutions to serious financial and health problems, ads that seem aimed at suckers. “Will your check clear?” might be the only question asked.
And there is no repetitive commercial that can more quickly send a listener to another station — or over the edge — than that 1-877/Kars-4-Kids jingle that has tortured WCBS’s audiences for years.
While WCBS’s features — on food, the law, travel, technology, education, the thoughts of Charles Osgood and Charles Grodin, and Joe Connelly’s business tidbits — remain appealing, the station has made waiting for them difficult.
The anchors also remain personable and reasonably credible — despite repeated reminders on how to win $1,000 by staying tuned to WCBS-Radio and the demand to say “WCBS this” or “WCBS that” every 10 seconds.
After all these years, there’s a creeping sadness to all-news WCBS-Radio, one that points to another paradise lost in the relentless sell.