Time With ... ABC Anchor David Muir

ABC world news tonight anchor David Muir wants to earn your trust, one broadcast at a time.

- Karl Vick

On ABC’s World News Tonight With David Muir, the nation’s best-liked anchorman could well be made of pixels, so effectively does the newscast approximate the digital vibrancy of a computer screen. But put the man on a New York City street at midday and his corporeal reality is affirmed by a steady stream of strangers, mostly women and mostly of a certain age.

“If I were younger …” says a grinning pedestrian approaching Muir at the corner of Central Park West and 66th Street, where he has arrived to have his photo taken for TIME.

“He’s even more handsome in person,” another calls out.

Muir shouts back, “Louder!”

Television does not lack for measures of popularity, and the summer of 2018 finds Muir perched atop a bunch of them. According to Nielsen, World News has often drawn more viewers than any other nightly newscast, winning last season and topping the ratings for 26 straight weeks this year. Q Scores, a company that measures “emotional connection” with consumers, places Muir ahead of other big names in the world of TV news and information.

That makes the 70th anniversary of ABC’s nightly newscast a bit sweeter, and perhaps a bit more relevant. In an era when most news on television is something that’s already known and just being chewed over, there’s something reassuring in finding that the largest audience of the day chooses a program dedicated to simply presenting it. Muir embraces what, seven decades on, counts as a tradition.