ABC News owes its existence to a government order breaking up NBC
In 1942 American regulators decided NBC had too much grip on radio and ordered it to split its two networks. The spun-off NBC Blue Network became ABC in 1943. For decades its news operation trailed CBS and NBC, until a sports executive took charge and reinvented it.
The Federal Communications Commission wanted more competition, particularly in news and political broadcasting, at a time when a handful of companies such as NBC and CBS dominated the airwaves. NBC carried out the split voluntarily rather than risk a forced break-up if its appeal failed. Television news followed in August 1948, when ABC launched its first owned station and production centre in New York, the station now known as WABC-TV.
The early decades were lean. ABC had fewer affiliate stations and weaker prime-time shows to fund its newsroom, and its rivals had built radio news operations back in the 1930s, so ABC consistently ranked third in viewership until the early 1970s. Stronger entertainment ratings then brought in advertising money, and in 1977 the network handed the news division to Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports and a restless experimenter with broadcast formats. Arledge created much of the lineup that still defines ABC News, including World News Tonight, 20/20, Nightline, This Week and Primetime Live.
His tenure had friction. On October 7, 1985, he spiked a 13-minute 20/20 report about Marilyn Monroe, calling it gossip, and drew open criticism from the programme's anchors Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, with Downs insisting the story was more carefully documented than much Watergate coverage.
The division kept adapting to new media. ABCNews.com launched on May 15, 1997, with a staff of about 30 and video clips delivered via RealVideo. ABC Radio relaunched in 2015 and was renamed ABC Audio in 2019 as podcasts took off, and ABC News Radio is now the largest commercial radio news organisation in the country. The streaming channel ABC News Live debuted on Roku in May 2019, and the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight moved over from ESPN in 2018. That same year, a Simmons Research survey of 38 news organisations ranked ABC News second in Americans' trust, behind The Wall Street Journal.
Source: ABC News (United States)
