ABC World News Tonight

ABC World News Tonight (titled ABC World News Tonight with David Muir for its weeknight broadcasts since September 2014) is the flagship daily evening television news program of ABC News, the news division of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) television network in the United States. It is currently the most watched network newscast in the United States, with an average of 2 million more than its nearest rival, NBC Nightly News. Since 2014, the program's weekday broadcasts have been anchored by David Muir. As of February 6–7, 2021, Whit Johnson and Linsey Davis anchor the Saturday and Sunday editions of the newscast respectively.

The program has been anchored at various times by a number of other presenters since its debut in 1948. It also has used various titles, including ABC Evening News from 1968 to 1978, World News Tonight from 1978 to 2006, World News from 2006 to 2009, and ABC World News from 2009 to 2014. Since 2014, the program has been called ABC World News Tonight. The weeknight edition of ABC World News Tonight airs live at 6:30 p.m. in the Eastern and 5:30 p.m. in the Central Time Zones. However ABC affiliates KGNS, KNOE-2, WEEK-2, and WNCF air ABC World News Tonight half-an-hour later on delay. WSB also airs it on a delay, the only ABC station in the Eastern Time Zone to do so.

ABC began a nightly newscast in the summer of 1948, when H. R. Baukhage and Jim Gibbons hosted News and Views. This was succeeded by After the Deadlines in 1951 and All Star News in 1952. In the fall of 1953, John Daly began anchoring the then-15-minute John Daly and the News. Daly, who served as host of the CBS game show What's My Line? contemporaneously, anchored the newscast until 1960, with multiple hosts and formats succeeding him. Anchors of the program during the early 1960s, sometimes for short periods, included Alex Dreier, John Secondari, Fendall Winston Yerxa, Al Mann, Bill Shadel, and the three-person team of John Cameron Swayze (formerly of NBC), Bill Lawrence, and Bill Sheehan. In 1962, Ron Cochran was appointed as full-time anchor, staying with the program, entitled, “Ron Cochran with the News”, until 1965. After Cochran left the program, Peter Jennings, a Canadian journalist who was 26 years old at the time, was named anchor of the retitled Peter Jennings with the News.

In December 1967, the inexperienced Jennings left the anchor chair and was reassigned by the news division as an international correspondent for the news program. The newly renamed ABC Evening News was hosted, in succession, by Bob Young (January 1968 to May 1968), and then by Frank Reynolds (May 1968 to December 1970), who was joined by Howard K. Smith in May 1969. The program expanded from 15 to 30 minutes in January 1967, nearly 3+1⁄2 years after both CBS and NBC had expanded their evening news programs to a half-hour.

Harry Reasoner, formerly of CBS News and 60 Minutes, joined ABC News in 1970 to co-anchor ABC Evening News with Smith, beginning that December, replacing Reynolds. The ratings increased steadily, but still remained in third place, behind dominant CBS and NBC. In 1975, Howard K. Smith was moved to a commentator role, and Reasoner briefly assumed sole-anchor responsibilities until he was paired with Barbara Walters, who became the first female network anchor when she joined the program on October 4, 1976. Ratings for the nightly news broadcast declined shortly thereafter, possibly due in part to the lack of chemistry between Reasoner and Walters. Reasoner would eventually return to CBS and 60 Minutes, while Walters became a regular on the newsmagazine 20/20.

Even in areas with three full-time network affiliates, ABC stations often opted to broadcast the news program in the 6:00 p.m./5:00 p.m. timeslot to entice viewers by presenting the day's national and international news first, thus making it more likely that they would stay tuned to the station's local newscast immediately following the program (or one half-hour afterward), instead of turning to CBS or NBC.

Starting in 1973, before the advent of closed captioning, PBS began airing an open captioned version of the ABC Evening News that was distributed to various public television stations throughout the U.S., airing mostly in late-night timeslots five hours after the original ABC broadcast. This version was produced by WGBH, the Boston PBS station, which provided the captions and repackaged the broadcast with additional news stories – some of which were of special interest to the hearing impaired – as well as late-news developments, weather forecasts, and sports scores inserted in place of commercials. It was originally titled The Captioned ABC Evening News, and later as The Captioned ABC News, and it was originally distributed by the Eastern Educational Network, before becoming a national program under PBS a year later. The practice continued until 1982, when real-time closed captioning was first introduced in the United States by the National Captioning Institute.

Always the perennial third in the national ratings, ABC News president Roone Arledge reformatted the program, relaunching it as World News Tonight in July 1978. Reynolds, who was demoted when the network hired Reasoner, returned as lead anchor, reporting from ABC News' Washington, D.C. bureau. Max Robinson – who became the first African American network news anchor upon his appointment on the program – anchored national news from the news division's Chicago bureau. Peter Jennings, who also returned for a second stint, reported international headlines from the division's London bureau.