Harry Reasoner

[dustintv]

Did Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters ever make up for their feud during the time which they co-anchored ABC World News Tonight (then called ABC Evening News)?

 

[Mike Stroud]

I think this might help answer your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTdot_qjcts. IMO, Reasoner never really belonged on a nightly newscast; documentaries were his specialty. Had Frank Reynolds remained Howard K. Smith's partner on ABC Evening News in the early 1970s, that network might have become competitive a lot sooner than it did--it took the return of Reynolds in 1978 to start ABC on its path to the number-one slot.

 

[bpatrick]

Except for two things: Reasoner ranked second
(behind Cronkite) in popularity among all network
newspeople at the time ABC hired him; second,
ABC still had several holdout affiliates (such as
Atlanta and Birmingham) that didn't come aboard
until Reasoner had been with ABC a year (Atlanta)
to almost two years (Birmingham).

World News Tonight caught on as much for its
style as for its anchors, establishing itself once
and for all as competitive thanks to ABC's superior
coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis on all its
news broadcasts.

 

[Ultimajock]

I think this might help answer your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTdot_qjcts. IMO, Reasoner never really belonged on a nightly newscast; documentaries were his specialty. Had Frank Reynolds remained Howard K. Smith's partner on ABC Evening News in the early 1970s, that network might have become competitive a lot sooner than it did--it took the return of Reynolds in 1978 to start ABC on its path to the number-one slot.

...and Reynolds was canned from The ABC Evening News specifically because he was the anchorman Vice President Spiro Agnew liked to dump on the most by name. ABC was infamous for kissing the Nixon Administration's collective posterior at the time, the two main holdouts in that shop (until Watergate broke) being Reynolds and Sam Donaldson...