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 weekend editions of the newscast, with Johnson anchoring on Saturdays and Davis anchoring on Sundays. 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 1970 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. History 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 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 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 News was hosted, in succession, by Bob Young (October 1967 to May 1968), and then by Frank Reynolds (May 1968 to December 1970), who was joined by Howard K. Smith in May 1969.