The program is broadcast live at 4:00 a.m. Eastern Time, preceding local news beginning at 4:30 a.m. on many CBS stations.

Some CBS stations (such as WAKA in Montgomery, Alabama, which still does not air it today) were forced to pre-empt the program when they implemented it less than two months earlier.

Walter Cronkite and sportscaster Jim McKay both anchored the original CBS Morning News at one time.

Other anchors of the broadcast in this format included John Hart, Hughes Rudd, Sally Quinn, Richard Threlkeld, Lesley Stahl and Bruce Morton.

In her absence, Kurtis was joined by a rotating series of co-hosts, principally Maria Shriver, Meredith Vieira and Jane Wallace.

Faith Daniels took over and would remain on the anchor desk, most of the time sharing the role with Forrest Sawyer (July to December 1985 and January to September 1987) and later Douglas Edwards and Charles Osgood, until Daniels left CBS to become anchor of competing early-morning newscast NBC News at Sunrise in 1990.

In November 2010, CBS Morning News became the third and final early morning news program to begin broadcasting in high-definition television; its counterpart, Up to the Minute, continued to be broadcast in standard-definition television until November 2012, when the program converted to high definition.

ET newswheel, which itself rebranded from CBSN AM in 2021; the 7:00 hour then became a half-hour show titled CBS Morning News now anchored by Errol Barnett.