'World News Tonight' Celebrates 25 Years

July 10, 2003 -- Twenty-five years ago, on July 10, 1978, ABCNEWS' World News Tonight first went on the air. The tape is part family album and part time capsule.

There were three of us then — and we all had more hair. I was in London; Max Robinson, the first black American anchor on a network newscast, was in Chicago; Frank Reynolds was in Washington.

Frank began the broadcast with something of a mission statement: "Speaking for all the men and women of ABCNEWS, I promise you an accurate, responsible and meaningful report on news at home and abroad."

We still believe in that. And other things don't change.

We had stories about a tire recall and the debate about abortion seemed just as intense then.

We had a short story about a man who had taken what he said was a bomb into one of the World Trade Center towers. By broadcast time, he had not yet surrendered.

As Lynn Sherr reported, "The police negotiating team moved in and began to talk with Frczek through translators."

And our science editor, the late Jules Bergman, whose voice is heard throughout the movie Apollo 13, did a report on the future of the space shuttle and the first women astronauts.

"I'd like to fly any mission, actually," said astronaut Judy Resnick, who later died in the Challenger explosion in January 1986. "The intent of a mission specialist is to train us to be generalists and to learn a little bit about every field, and I don't really have anything in particular in mind right now. I'd like to be glad to fly in anything they'd like me to fly."

The sound bites were all longer than they are today. The country's attention span has changed. Perhaps we in television are partly to blame.

How long ago is 25 years? We noticed that we all had typewriters, not computers. And you can hear the clickety-clack of the wire service machines in the background of the newscast.

• To read the transcript of the first broadcast of World News Tonight, click here.

12 Minutes Devoted to Treason Trial

And finally on this day in 1978, we were deep in the Cold War. Our lead story was the treason trial in Moscow of two Jewish dissidents, Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Sharansky.

"Our major story tonight concerns brave men who dare to speak their minds," said Frank Reynolds.

"Frank, the men you're referring to went on trial in the Soviet Union today, in cases almost certain to further strain Soviet-American relations," I said.

It was not easy to cover the news in the Soviet Union.

"Western reporting is severely limited, first because no Western newsman is allowed to attend and in our case because a film report our correspondent delivered to Moscow Airport never arrived here in the West," I explained in my report.

But that night we did six reports on the trial: Charles Bierbauer reported from Moscow, Bill Seamans was in Israel and Sam Donaldson reported from Jimmy Carter's White House. Also, Barbara Walters interviewed lawyer Alan Dershowitz about the Soviet legal system. "The trial is a farce," said Dershowitz.

And we had commentary at the end of the broadcast then, from Howard K. Smith, who said that night the Soviets could only rule through tyranny: "Forced obedience is thus the very air the state lives by and it would go to any extreme, even to war, to keep it," he said.

How the world has changed. Max Robinson and Frank Reynolds have both since died. I'm the survivor of the trio.

One other thing that hasn't changed. Then and now, we still have commercials in the broadcast for pills.