When I was young I watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. He was one of Ed Murrow's understudies.
Did CBS go from Good night Gracie, to Good Night and good luck to good bye, or have we all gone totally crazy?
What we’re going to be outlining is a long arc in American broadcast culture from vaudeville reassurance, to Murrow’s moral confrontation, to institutional exhaustion.
And yes, the sequence feels symbolic enough to make people wonder whether the medium itself is saying goodbye.
We’ve connected three very different CBS moments:
- “Say goodnight, Gracie.”
- Edward R. Murrow’s “Good night, and good luck.”
- The apparent final “goodbye” of legacy broadcast authority itself.
The emotionally charged historical is hard to miss.
October 14, 1953 was the beginning of the televised collision between journalism and demagoguery: Army McCarthy hearings and the broader era of McCarthyism. Murrow and producer Fred Friendly used CBS television to challenge fear-driven politics directly on air through See It Now. Murrow’s sign-off “Good night, and good luck” carried weight because it implied journalism had civic obligations beyond entertainment.
Then we contrast that with:
- The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show ending with “Say goodnight, Gracie,”
- Now the end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the shutdown of CBS News Radio after nearly a century.
That juxtaposition lands because CBS once represented all three pillars simultaneously:
- Entertainment,
- Journalism,
- Shared national culture.
Today those pillars are missing or at least fragmented.
The end of CBS News Radio is especially symbolic because radio news was where CBS built much of its authority in the first place. Murrow’s wartime broadcasts, “World News Roundup,” election nights, assassinations, moon landings all came through that infrastructure. The company itself acknowledged the closure reflected “challenging economic realities” and changing audience habits.
So to ask - have we all gone totally crazy? is really asking whether the country lost the institutional center that once mediated reality.
Many Americans feel this way because:
- Mass audiences became algorithmic audiences,
- Trusted anchors became influencers,
- Scheduled broadcasts became endless feeds,
- Editorial gatekeeping collapsed into engagement optimization.
Murrow spoke into a culture where millions saw the same thing at the same time. That world is now gone.
There’s also irony in the timing:
- Murrow confronted McCarthy-era fear and propaganda using television,
- Modern networks now struggle against attention economics, polarization, and platform dependency.
Different technology. Similar anxiety about truth.
Our phrasing works almost like a compressed history of CBS itself:
“Goodnight, Gracie.”
“Good night, and good luck.”
“Goodbye.”
It is not crazy, its cultural pattern recognition.
October 14, 1953, in the CBS Studios, with on-screen titles explaining that McCarthy has claimed that there are over 200 Communists in the US government.
Say Goodnight Gracie ... this 3 minute segment closed each week's "George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" (ran on CBS from 1950-1958).
The Late Show ran on CBS for 33 years, from August 30, 1993, to May 21, 2026. The franchise aired a total of 33 seasons, anchored by two main hosts:
- David Letterman: Hosted from 1993 until his retirement in 2015.
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Stephen Colbert: Took over the desk in 2015 and hosted until the franchise was retired.
CBS News Radio permanently signs off the air on May 22, 2026, ending a historic 99-year run of broadcasting. Executives cited shifting media habits, a decline in traditional radio listenership, and economic realities for the decision, which resulted in the elimination of the division's staff. - The Final Broadcast: The network, which helped pioneer broadcast journalism and was once home to legendary voices like Edward R. Murrow, aired its last top-of-the-hour updates on Friday night.
- Impacted Affiliates: The move directly impacted roughly 700 local radio stations across the United States that relied on the network for national newscasts.
- Industry Changes: The discontinuation reflects a major shift in how audiences consume audio content, with a significant pivot toward podcasts, streaming, and social media.