CBS Evening News

Early years (1941–1948)[edit]

Upon becoming commercial station WCBW (channel 2, now WCBS-TV) on July 1, 1941, the pioneer CBS television station in New York City broadcast two daily news programs, at 2:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. weekdays, anchored by Richard Hubbell. Most of the newscasts featured Hubbell reading a script with only occasional cutaways to a map or still photograph. When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, WCBW (which was usually off the air on Sunday to give the engineers a day off), took to the air at 8:45 p.m. with an extensive special report. The national emergency broke down the unspoken wall between CBS radio and television. WCBW executives convinced radio announcers and experts such as George Fielding Elliot and Linton Wells to come to the CBS television studios at Grand Central Station from the radio network's base at 485 Madison Avenue, to give information and commentary on the attack. The WCBW special report that night lasted less than 90 minutes, but it pushed the limits of live television in 1941 and opened up new possibilities for future broadcasts. As CBS wrote in a special report to the FCC, the unscheduled live news broadcast on December 7 "was unquestionably the most stimulating challenge and marked the greatest advance of any single problem faced up to that time."


Additional newscasts were scheduled in the early days of World War II, including War Backgrounds (December 1941–February 1942), World This Week (February–April 1942), and America At War (March–May 1942). In May 1942, WCBW (like almost all television stations) temporarily suspended studio operations, which resulted in the station sharply cutting back its live program schedule, and resorting exclusively to the occasional broadcast of films. This was primarily because much of the staff had either joined the military service or were redeployed to war-related technical research, and to prolong the life of the early, unstable cameras which were now impossible to repair due to the wartime lack of parts.


In May 1944, as the war began to turn in favor of the Allies, WCBW reopened the studios and the newscasts returned, briefly anchored by Ned Calmer, followed by Alan Jackson, Everett Holles, and Dwight Cooke. After the war, expanded news programs appeared on the WCBW schedule. The station's call letters were changed to WCBS-TV in 1946. Anchors included Bob McKee, Milo Boulton, Jim McMullin, Larry LeSueur, Tom O’Connor, and, beginning in 1947, Douglas Edwards.