The Foote Files: When WCBS Newsradio 88 Made The News
(CBS 11) - It's not too often that a news media outlet "becomes" the story as opposed to "covering" the story but that happened to New York's WCBS Newsradio 880 in 1967.
The station was preparing to launch an all-news format on August 28, 1967 to compete against Group W's 1010 WINS, which had gone all-news on April 19, 1965. The anchors that would launch the new format included Charles Osgood, Ed Bradley, Pat Summerall, and Robert Vaughn (not the same as actor Robert Vaughn in "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.").
Hours before the launch, a small private plane crashed into WCBS's tower, destroyed it, knocked the station off the air, and killed the pilot. Yet that wasn't going to deter CBS management, so it launched on 101.1 WCBS-FM until such time that CBS engineers could get the AM facility back up and running.
In that day, the FM band was primarily music and was not quite on the same playing field as the AM band since many automobiles back then only had AM Radio (today it is quite a bit different!).
Another story on how media comes to the rescue in times of trouble....here for itself!
