ABC News

Radio Origins

ABC came into being as the Blue Network in 1943, the result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that broke up NBC's longtime ownership of two radio networks. Blue was sold by NBC to Edward J. Noble, who had made his fortune with Life Saver candies. In 1945, the Blue Network changed its name to the American Broadcasting Company. The radio network was the first to break the national network ban on use of recordings on the air. As the fledgling network lacked the funding to enter television networking, in 1953 the company was taken over by Paramount Theaters under the direction of Leonard Goldenson. Beginning in the late 1950s, ABC fed hourly newscasts to its affiliates five minutes before the hour.

Over the years, the network enjoyed the work of a number of distinguished journalists. Raymond Graham Swing (1887–1968) was one of them, broadcasting Blue Network and then ABC News until 1947, sharing time with Elmer Davis (1890–1958). After a long career, including heading a government information agency during the war, Davis spent his last decade providing news and comment on ABC, offering liberal views and editorials against the communist witch hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Paul Harvey (1918–2009) began his long radio network career on ABC in 1951 and was still on the air with his Paul Harvey News and Comment broadcast from Chicago more than a half century later.

A major boost for ABC radio came in early 1968, when the radio network broke away from the traditional network model of a single feed to the same affiliates. ABC radio was divided into four distinct programming services, sharing a single network telephone line to keep costs down. ABC had received permission to do this from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which allowed the move as long as only one of the four services was on the air at a time. One of them, the American Information Network, focused on providing news and feature programming and ran its primary newscast at the top of the hour. The other three services, including the first national network built around FM stations, carried their shorter newscasts at different times each hour. When satellite delivery became possible in the 1980s, further services were added.

Only two of these—including the American Information Network—were still operating by the middle years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Both received what was by then called ABC News Radio service from news division bureaus in New York, Washington, and Los [Page 2]Angeles, broadcast on the hour (the FCC's limit on simultaneous programming had been dropped in the late 1970s). The American Information Network provided slightly longer stories and more emphasis on world news. In addition, sound bites and pre-made reporter packages were fed to affiliates for their own use by both satellite and a dedicated website. All told, more than 4,000 radio stations carried ABC newscasts to 100 million listeners a week.

...