ABC News

ABC News is the news division of the American Broadcasting Company, a US national broadcaster headquartered in New York and owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. It runs the flagship evening programmes World News Tonight and Good Morning America, the long-running Sunday public-affairs show This Week, and the digital and streaming arms ABC News Live and ABC News Studios. Its White House correspondents have unbroken pool access dating to the postwar era, and the division's lead anchor is the principal interviewer on most major presidential interviews of the modern era.

ABC News features in the 9 May 2026 Iran briefing as the outlet to which Donald Trump described the 7-8 May US-Iran kinetic exchange as "just a love tap" while F/A-18 Super Hornets from the USS George H.W. Bush were dropping precision munitions through Iranian-flagged tanker smokestacks the same morning. Trump's ABC remarks contradicted his own Truth Social posts of the same day threatening that future strikes would land "a lot more violently". The contradiction is now a documented part of the Lowdown verbal-vs-kinetic pattern.

The broadcaster's relevance across topics is wider than Iran: ABC News carries US presidential-cycle coverage for the 2026 midterms, hosts the principal candidates' debate cycle, and is one of the four outlets whose pool reporting underpins same-day White House sourcing for any topic that turns on what the president actually said versus what subsequently appeared on signed paper.