The recitation of news on television was always rather dry affair, with a large part of the airtime filled with newscasters reading off prompters. When the BBC premiered their television news program in the mid 1950s, it was generally (and fairly) dismissed as lackluster and uninspiring. ABC launched their newscast around the same time, and like the BBC kept it in spite of the criticism. The show went through various iterations until becoming the marquee name, World News Tonight.

On this day, July 10, in 1978, World News Tonight premiered, as the newest version of a nightly new show that ran since 1953. Things improved somewhat from those first years, with the addition of color, tape recordings and stock footage.

For two years, starting in the 1965  a freshfaced Canadian, Peter Jennings, anchored the program, called Peter Jennings with the News. In 1967 he was reassigned to international reporting, and made somewhat of a comeback as a regular correspondent from London, with World News Tonight. When the lead anchor of World News fell ill, that job was permanently given to Jennings, and in 1984 World News Tonight renamed World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.