'CBS TV News' Debuts

CBS was the first network to air an evening news program five nights a week, and later this month the CBS Evening News will observe its golden anniversary with a series of reports on the history of the broadcast and some of the distinguished journalists who worked on it.

But back in 1948, when it first toddled onto the network stage, CBS TV News (as the nightly program was called in those early days) faced an extremely difficult challenge, and some of the strongest resistance to it came from CBS's own star correspondents.

At the time the big-name journalists at CBS were Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood and a handful of others who had made their reputations as radio correspondents in Europe during World War II. Having established themselves in radio, that was the medium that inspired their loyalty, the one they felt most at home in, and to a man, they greeted the arrival of television with disdain and apprehension.

To Murrow and his colleagues from World War II, television was all glitz and no substance — and they had a point. In 1948 television was an infantile medium that specialized in such garish idiocies as Roller Derby and phony wrestling.

There were only a few visionaries at CBS (and elsewhere) who grasped the potential for broadcasting news on television, and they knew they could not persuade anyone from the top echelon of radio correspondents to take on the role of pioneer in the new medium.

So they offered the job to a younger, lesser-known correspondent, and that's how Douglas Edwards became CBS's first television news star.

	Golden Anniversary
	The Early Years
	Happy 50th, CBS Evening News

Written by Gary Paul Gates. Associate Producer Adam S. Gaynor