ABC News (United States)

• 1. Introduction

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  ABC News has been delivering American journalism since the days when radio was the nation's primary window to the world. Its flagship broadcast, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, reaches millions each evening. But behind that familiar anchor desk lies a history of corporate spinoffs, personality clashes, legal battles, and a relentless push to compete against rivals who had a decade's head start. How did a network born from a regulatory order in 1942 become one of the most trusted names in American news? The answers run through a sports executive who transformed the newsroom, a scandal involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, a defamation lawsuit settled on the eve of depositions, and a streaming pivot that brought ABC News into millions of homes that never once tuned in by antenna. The story touches a question that haunts every major news organization: who decides what gets on the air, and why?

• 2. Born From a Breakup

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  The Federal Communications Commission ordered NBC to divest one of its two radio networks in 1942. The reason was straightforward: the FCC wanted to break the grip that NBC and CBS held over radio broadcasting, particularly news and political programming, and push the country toward a wider range of viewpoints. NBC chose to conduct the split voluntarily rather than wait for a forced ruling on its appeal, and in 1943 the NBC Blue Network became the independent entity that would grow into ABC.

  Television arrived quickly after that founding. ABC signed on its first owned-and-operated station, WJZ-TV in New York City, which is now known as WABC-TV, in August 1948. Regular news broadcasts began almost immediately. For the next two decades and into the early 1970s, ABC News finished a distant third behind CBS and NBC in viewership. The gap was structural: ABC had fewer affiliate stations nationwide, and its prime-time entertainment lineup was too weak to deliver the kind of advertising revenue that funded serious news operations. CBS and NBC had also spent the 1930s building their radio news infrastructures, giving them a long institutional head start.

  The opening for ABC came in the 1970s. The network's prime-time entertainment programs finally found their footing, pulling in stronger ratings and higher advertising revenue. That cash flow made a new investment in news possible, and the man who would direct that investment arrived in 1977.

• 3. The Arledge Revolution

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  Roone Arledge came to ABC News in 1977 as the sitting president of ABC Sports, a role he kept while simultaneously taking the top job in news. He was known for experimenting with the broadcast model, and he brought that instinct with him. Under his direction, ABC launched or developed programs that became central to American television news culture: 20/20, World News Tonight, This Week, Nightline, and Primetime Live all bear his mark.

  By the late 1980s, ABC News was running the slogan "More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source." The claim was careful in its construction. It referred to the combined audience across television, radio, and the internet, not to any single telecast. That precision mattered because it let the network make a sweeping statement that was technically defensible.

  In June 1998, Arledge oversaw a significant restructuring of international news distribution. ABC News held an 80% stake in Worldwide Television News. That year, ABC News, the Nine Network, and ITN sold their respective interests in the service to the Associated Press. As part of the same transaction, ABC News signed a multi-year content deal with AP's affiliate video arm, Associated Press Television News, while contributing footage from its own distribution service, ABC News One. Arledge's tenure shaped the network's identity in ways that outlasted him, but the most contentious episode of his presidency arrived not on a broadcast but in an edit suite.

• 4. The Monroe File

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  On the 7th of October 1985, Roone Arledge killed a 13-minute 20/20 report about Marilyn Monroe. The decision triggered an immediate and public rupture inside ABC News. The report's executive producer, Av Westin, pushed back directly: "I don't anticipate not putting it on the air. The journalism is solid. Everything in there has two sources." Westin described what the segment documented: a relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and Monroe, and a separate relationship between John F. Kennedy and Monroe, both confirmed by eyewitnesses on camera.

  Hugh Downs, who co-anchored 20/20 alongside Barbara Walters, was equally direct in criticizing the kill decision. "I honestly believe that this is more carefully documented than anything any network did during Watergate," he said in an interview at the time. Arledge's own stated reason was blunter: the piece was "gossip-column stuff" that did not live up to its billing.

  According to an ABC staff member who had seen the report, the segment contained several additional elements. Fred Otash, a detective who identified himself as the chief wiretapper, appeared on camera, and three other wiretappers corroborated his account. The report also included eyewitness accounts of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster leader, allegedly ordering the wiretapping of Monroe's home to capture recordings of her conversations with the Kennedy brothers, including an account of Robert F. Kennedy visiting Monroe on the day of her death. Monroe's personal diaries, described by multiple on-camera sources as containing references to meetings with the Kennedys, were also discussed in the segment. The staff member who had seen the piece framed its core argument this way: because of the alleged relationships, organized crime's knowledge of them represented a compromise of the presidency. The reporter added that based on the reporting done to that point, no direct evidence of that compromise had been found.

  Arledge's decision had an immediate institutional consequence. Geraldo Rivera, a 20/20 correspondent who had publicly criticized Arledge over the kill despite having no involvement in the Monroe story, chose to leave ABC entirely. Arledge, who had been a defender of Rivera within the network, said he believed the story simply needed more work.

• 5. Digital and Cable Experiments

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  ABCNews.com launched on the 15th of May 1997, built by ABC News Internet Ventures, a joint venture that ABC News had formed with the web company Starwave the previous April. Starwave already ran ESPNet SportsZone, which would later become ESPN.com, and had been doing so since 1995. Disney wanted more direct control over its online properties, so the arrangement gave ABC News editorial authority while Starwave handled the technical operation. The site launched with a staff of about 30 people and featured short video and audio clips delivered through RealAudio and RealVideo technology from the start. Some content was also available through America Online.

  The network's first attempt at a cable news channel came earlier, in June 1982, when ABC News and Group W jointly launched Satellite News Channel as a satellite-delivered cable network. SNC broadcast a rotating newscast every 20 minutes, drawing on ABC News footage and seven Washington, D.C.-based crews. The channel struggled to win carriage from cable systems. ABC News and Group W sold the channel to CNN, a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting System, and CNN shut it down on the 27th of October 1983.

  A second cable attempt came in 2004. ABC News Now launched on the 26th of July of that year as a digital subchannel offering breaking news and a half-hour headline cycle. It was shut down as a digital subchannel after its experimental phase closed out with the presidential inauguration in 2005, though it continued in other forms before being replaced on cable by Fusion on the 28th of October 2013. Fusion itself was a joint venture between ABC News and Univision Communications, announced on the 2nd of May 2012 and launched the same day Fusion replaced ABC News Now on cable providers. Disney exited the Fusion partnership on the 21st of April 2016, and Univision operated the network alone until it shut down on the 31st of December 2021.

  The streaming era opened more successfully. In May 2019, ABC News Live launched on Roku as a news-focused streaming channel. It has since expanded to more than a dozen platforms including Disney+, Hulu, YouTube TV, and Prime Video Live TV, running as a 24/7 channel for breaking news and longer-form reports under the direction of Justin Dial, Vice President of Streaming Content.

• 6. The Stephanopoulos Settlement

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  In March 2024, Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, alleging that statements Stephanopoulos made during a This Week interview were false, intentional, malicious, and designed to cause harm. The statements concerned the case brought by journalist E. Jean Carroll, whose jury in Carroll II had found Trump liable for sexual assault and awarded Carroll five million dollars in damages. Stephanopoulos had repeatedly characterized Trump's liability as extending to rape; the presiding judge in the Carroll case had separately noted that Carroll's rape accusation was substantially true, but the jury verdict was on the narrower charge of sexual assault.

  ABC News moved to dismiss the suit in July, citing Judge Kaplan's language. The presiding judge in the defamation case rejected that motion. The case proceeded toward depositions, and in December 2024, a day after a judge ordered both Trump and Stephanopoulos to sit for depositions, ABC News settled.

  Legal experts noted that the settlement came before motions for summary judgment, which is earlier than is typical in defamation pre-trial procedures. Analysts suggested the timing may have reflected Trump's status as president-elect at the time of the settlement, or a decision to avoid the discovery process exposing potentially damaging internal information. Reporting from The New York Times cited company insiders who said Disney leadership was worried that a Trump-aligned jury in Florida could award damages exceeding the settlement amount, creating exposure through a difficult appeals process.

  The settlement required ABC News to pay fifteen million dollars to Trump's presidential library and one million dollars toward his legal fees. ABC and Stephanopoulos also agreed to publish a statement expressing regret for the inaccurate claims. The November 2025 confrontation between Trump and an ABC News reporter over the Jeffrey Epstein case, which led Trump to call for the revocation of the network's broadcasting license, followed less than a year after that settlement was finalized.