Radio December 7th, 1941 At approximately 2:25-2:30 PM The Radio Stations broke the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the stunned American public. There were 4 Major Radio Stations in 1941.

Mutual The first radio station to broadcast the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was local station WOR 710 in New York. WOR was the local affiliate of the national Mutual radio network. At 2:26 PM they interrupted a football game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and The New York Giants at The Polo Grounds to say “White House says that the *Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor.” The game was probably toward the end of first quarter as the game had started at 2:00 PM. There was no score. December 7th was the last day of the professional football regular season.

*The racial slur “Japs” would immediately become standard in the media’s coverage of the war. Today the word “Japs” does not even pass the spelling checker in Microsoft Word.

NBC Blue The show which had started at 2 PM was Great Plays. This week’s play was “The Inspector General”. It was interrupted for the Pearl Harbor bulletin at 2:30 PM.

NBC Red Sammy Kaye’s Orchestra was just ending at 2:29 PM and The University of Chicago Roundtable (The weekly topic was “Canada—Neighbor at War”) was to begin when their first bulletin hit the airwaves.

CBS Other radio listeners would hear the announcement at 2:30 PM on CBS Radio where the regularly scheduled news show The World Today had just started. The news show would stay with the Pearl Harbor news, while radio shows on other stations returned to their regularly scheduled programs, giving periodic updates. This seems amazing today, but radio, especially “news radio” was just in it’s infancy, and so far no major events had occurred before to test the news reporting logistics of radio. Also, radio was driven by commercial sponsors —and thus the radio stations were not supposed to preempt the programs without permission of the sponsors.

Throughout the day, radio stations continued to report the story as details became available. These details would bring home to America the full impact of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. News of the attack was initially heavily censored (by today’s standards) in the days and months to come. No accurate casualty figures or number of ships sunk were released to the press. Film of the attack had been captured by a Fox Movietone cameraman who was in Pearl Harbor at the time, however it was not shown to the public until over a year later in January of 1943.