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 this 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 telecasting. 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, 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 with live telecasts.
The ABC News slogan, "More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source", is 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.
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