ABOUT ABC NEWS

ABOUT ABC NEWS

ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of the American Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Its flagship program is ABC World News Tonight; other programs include morning show Good Morning America, Nightline, newsmagazine shows Primetime and 20/20, and Sunday morning political affairs program This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

History

ABC began news broadcasts early in its independent existence as a radio network after the Federal Communications Commission ordered the former NBC Blue Network to be spun off as an independent company in 1943. This was done to keep single or a few companies such as NBC and CBS from dominating radio broadcasting in the United States, and in particular, from dominating news and political broadcasting and projecting narrow points-of-view. Television broadcasting was suspended however, during World War II.

Regular ABC television news broadcasts began soon after ABC started transmitting from its initial New York City television station (WABC-TV) and production center in late summer 1948. ABC news broadcasts have continued as the ABC television network spread across the country, a process that took many years, from that beginning in 1948 through today, but they have not always had the same level of success that they enjoy now. Throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s, ABC News consistently ranked third in viewership behind CBS News and NBC News. Until the 1970s, the ABC television network had fewer affiliate stations, and also weaker prime-time programming lineups to support the network's news departments than the two larger networks had, each of which had established their radio news operations during the 1930s.

Under Roone Arledge

Only after Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports at that time, became the president of ABC News in 1977, at a time when the network's prime-time entertainment programs were achieving good ratings and drawing in advertising revenues and profits to the ABC corporation overall, was ABC able to invest the resources to make it a major source of news broadcasting. Arledge, known for experimenting with the broadcast "model", created many of ABC News's most popular and enduring programs, including 20/20, ABC World News Tonight, This Week, Nightline and Primetime Live.

ABC News gained respect in the early 1980s by covering the Iran hostage crisis and, later, for covering the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area (which occurred during the network's sports coverage of the 1989 World Series) with live telecasts.

ABC News' longtime slogan, "More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source", was a claim that refers to the number of people who watch, listen, and read ABC News programming on television, the radio, and the Internet, and not necessarily to the telecasts alone.[1]

In June 1998, ABC News sold its 80% stake in Worldwide Television News to the Associated Press as did the other two owners, Nine Network and ITN. Additional, ABC News signed a multi-year deal with AP for APTV subscription while providing material to APTV from News One, ABC's news service.[2]

On May 2, 2012, Univision Communications and ABC News entered into a joint venture to launch a digital cable and satellite television network for English-speaking Hispanic and Latino Americans. On February 11, 2013, the companies announced the dual network will be called "Fusion".[3][4] The network launched on October 28, 2013.