The Eyewitness

How a prison fire and a charismatic inmate revealed a waiting audience for compelling radio news on CBS.

In announcing that CBS News Radio would end in late May, Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski, the editor in chief and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote that their network had “delivered original reporting to the nation” for almost a century. “CBS News Radio,” they claimed, “served as the foundation for everything we have built since 1927.” But the truth is somewhat different—when the Columbia Broadcasting System debuted, in September of 1927, with sixteen affiliated stations stretching from Rhode Island to Iowa, the network had no news division and instead promised “radio showmanship,” with “exclusive celebrities” supplying “music and fun.” (One reviewer wrote that its three-hour premiere declined “in quality with astounding speed” and that “no one not paid to” listen “could have survived it.”)

The network’s fortunes changed with a spontaneous moment of eyewitness news commentary that’s nearly been lost to history. On April 21, 1930, a fire broke out at the Ohio Penitentiary, in downtown Columbus. Soon listeners would hear an unexpected voice broadcasting over the airwaves—a man identified not by a name, but by a number: “Convict X-46812.” Listeners heard him describe an inferno that killed three hundred and twenty-two prisoners and still ranks as the deadliest disaster in the history of US prisons. For the first time, breaking news, direct from the scene, crisscrossed America over CBS. This unexpected broadcast—eight years before Edward R. Murrow began working as a reporter—captured the public’s attention and showed that CBS could rebrand by investing in newsgathering. Only then did CBS start hiring the people who would build its news division. The network’s legacy of original and compelling reporting begins not with Murrow, but with the forgotten voice of a Black prisoner named Otto Gardner, known among inmates as “Deacon.”