WCBS-TV's history dates back to CBS' opening of experimental station W2XAB on July 21, 1931, using the mechanical television system that had been more-or-less perfected in the late 1920s.

W2XAB pioneered program development including small-scale dramatic acts, monologues, pantomime, and the use of projection slides to simulate sets.

W2XAB returned with an all-electronic system in 1939 from a new studio complex in Grand Central Station and a transmitter located at the Chrysler Building broadcasting on channel 2.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued permits to CBS and NBC at the same time and intended WNBT and WCBW to sign on simultaneously on July 1, so no one station could claim to be the "first".

Regular daily operations began on October 29 and WCBW received a full broadcast license, its construction permit and commercial program authorization on March 10, 1942.

On August 11, 1951, WCBS-TV broadcast the first baseball game on color television, between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves from Ebbets Field.

The backup transmitter had been put into operation once before, when the World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, knocked most of the area's stations off the air for a week.

Since the station qualified for the nightlight clause in the DTV Delay Act,[14][15] WCBS kept its analog signal on for one month to provide public service announcements, starting at 3 p.m. on June 12 and permanently shutting it down during the early morning hours of July 13, 2009; this possibly made it the last full power NTSC broadcast television station in the United States to discontinue analog transmissions.

[citation needed] Digital subchannel 2.2, branded as CBS New York Plus, was launched in November 2011 as a 24-hour news channel drawing upon the resources of WCBS-TV, WCBS radio (880 AM), WINS (1010 AM), and WFAN (660 AM).

[17] The company announced that it would add additional on-air staff and expand WLNY's local news programming (at the time, that station had only an 11 p.m. newscast).

WLNY suspended its own news operations the previous day[18] and began airing WCBS-TV produced newscasts on July 2, 2012.

(Decades returned to the New York market in October 2019, when it was added to WNYW channel 5.5 as part of an agreement between Weigel and Fox Television Stations).

WCBW executives convinced radio announcers and experts such as George Fielding Elliot and Linton Wells to come down to the Grand Central Station studios during the evening and give information and commentary on the attack.

As CBS wrote in a special report to the FCC, the unscheduled live news broadcast on December 7 "was unquestionably the most stimulating challenge and marked the greatest advance of any single problem faced up to that time".

In May 1944, as the war began to turn in favor of the Allies, WCBW reopened the studios and the newscasts returned, briefly anchored by Ned Calmer, and then by Everett Holles.

Jensen had only come to WCBS-TV a year earlier (he had been at WBZ-TV in Boston), but was already well known for his coverage of Robert F. Kennedy's 1964 campaign for the United States Senate.

During this time, three of the longest-tenured anchor teams in New York – Jensen and Rolland Smith, WABC-TV's Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel, and WNBC-TV's Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons – went head-to-head with each other.

WCBS-TV had many well-known personalities during this era: anchors Dave Marash, Rolland Smith, Michele Marsh and Vic Miles; meteorologists Frank Field and John Coleman; reporters Meredith Vieira, Randall Pinkston, Tony Guida, John Stossel and Arnold Díaz and sportscaster Warner Wolf.

In 1988, controversy involving an exchange between Jim Jensen and co-anchor Bree Walker, whose fingers and toes are fused together as a result of the condition ectrodactyly.

On August 31, 1992, Channel 2 debuted its one-hour weekday morning newscast, this time with the anchor team of Morry Alter and Lisa Rudolph, Jay Trelease with traffic, and Craig Allen with weather.

At the time, Jensen had served as an anchor longer than anyone in New York television history (he has since been passed by WABC-TV's Beutel and WNBC's Scarborough).

It was also part of a major reconstruction of the newscast, culminating in the May 1997 rebranding to News 2; two months prior, Warner Wolf had returned to the station, having left in 1992 for WUSA-TV, the CBS affiliate in Washington.

After a year, little to no progress in the ratings was made, so this format was done away with; a new "virtual studio" format (involving CGI being used to depict sections of the news studio that did not exist in reality), alongside bright, orange and white graphics and a "club" remix of WBBM-TV's "This is Chicago, Chicago's My Town" theme (which the station has used in various forms for all but a few years since 1982) was tried out.

Ironically, the cafeteria at the CBS Broadcast Center was cited for violations by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

On June 1, 2005, Jim Rosenfield rejoined the station to anchor the 5 and 11 p.m. newscasts with Roz Abrams, who joined channel 2 the previous year after an 18-year run at WABC-TV.

The son of a former CBS executive, Rosenfield had worked at the station from 1998 to 2000 before moving to WNBC (to anchor Live at Five) after a contract dispute with channel 2.

The station decided to move its news department in a new direction under new general manager Peter Dunn, who axed "Shame on You" and "Eat at Your Own Risk".

On March 12 and 13, 2020, WCBS-TV's evening newscasts were produced by Los Angeles sister station KCBS-TV, and its morning newscasts originated from KPIX-TV in San Francisco, after the CBS Broadcast Center was closed for disinfection due to two employees testing positive for COVID-19, with weathercasts being originated from the weather department's mobile broadcast unit.

Maurice DuBois was promoted to co-anchor of the CBS Evening News with John Dickerson in January 2025, and subsequently departed WCBS-TV in order to focus on the national broadcast.

[38] In 2002, WCBS-TV acquired the over-the-air rights to New York Yankees baseball games, replacing Fox owned-and-operated station WNYW.