A twenty-nine-year old newcomer to ABC Sports wrote a memo to his boss in 1960 describing how he planned to capture for the television cameras "all the excitement, wonder, jubilation, and despair" of college football games. "We are going to add show business to sports!" trumpeted Roone Pinckney Arledge, Jr. (italics and exclamation point his), a Columbia University alum who came crashing like a bull from the chute to become, eventually, the best-known (although far from the best-loved) television executive in America. Thirty-four years later, Arledge is the undisputed top bull in the ring, having revolutionized the television coverage of sports and moved on to create the medium's highest-rated and most star-studded news organization. Leading journalists at all three of the old-line broadcast networks cross themselves reverentially at the sound of his name because Arledge singlehandedly drove the salaries of TV news stars sky high by his unbuttoned bidding wars for the newspersons he coveted - Dan Rather, Dia Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, and many others.

Indeed, Rather and Brokaw - and of course Peter Jennings - owe him their very anchor chairs. In 1980, Arledge wooed Rather with the ardor of a moonstruck sophomore ("Whatever it takes to make you feel good," was his offer), causing CBS to panic and nudge the venerable Walter Cronkite from the anchor slot he had occupied so honorably and well. Roger Mudd, Cronkite's longtime heir-apparent, was so enraged at losing out to Rather that he decamped to NBC to anchor its evening news program. Arledge then pursued Brokaw with promises of riches, forcing NBC to hand him co-anchorship with Mudd. In a power play, Brokaw emerged as sole anchor, with Mudd banished to public television. A dozen years later the effects of Arledge's handiwork are still on view: the hapless Rather is teamed uncomfortably with Connie Chung in a bootless effort to grab ratings; Brokaw more often than not has been the "show" horse; and a reincarnated Peter Jennings (he failed as ABC News anchor in 1965 at age twenty-seven) sits atop the eveningews ratings heap. And besides that, Arledge purloined a pearl of great price: the fair Diane Sawyer, a putative jewel in CBS's rusted crown, as well as the splendid David Brinkley, who had dominated TV news (with Chet Huntley) for many years at NBC.

The thrill of ABC News's victories in the Arledge era (1977- ) and the agony of its conspicuous defeats are effectively limited in Marc Gunther's encyclopedic history. Pervading it is the ambiguous presence of the pudgy, rubicund Scotsman from Long Island: shy, ungenerous, aloof, shrewd, distant, brilliant, profligate, uncommunicative, calculating, dour, charming, insecure, brooding, exasperating, self-absorbed.

At word that the P.T. Barnum of TV sports had unaccountably acceded to the presidency of ABC News, alarm bells went off throughout the TV news universe. Arledge had delivered royally on his promise to add show business to sports (his italics), and the terror mounted that he would do the same to news. And besides, he hadn't a shred of journalistic experience. Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings were so discommoded by the prospect that they visited Fred Pierce, president of the network, in an effort to torpedo the appointment. (Arledge has not held that kamikaze mission against them. Has he?)

ABC News in those early years was, in fact, a grubby, out-at-the-knees kid among the Saville Row practitioners of television news. ("A graveyard," Arledge called it.) But, as Gunther relates - in perhaps greater detail than the average reader will care to absorb - Arledge supervised (with the help of imaginative producers like Av Westin, Dorrance Smith, Victor Neufeld, Jeff Gralnick, Rick Kaplan, and Phyllis McGrady) the creation of 20/20, Nightline, This Week with David Brinkley, and PrimeTime Live, and maneuvered World News Tonight right to the top. Not without trauma: the 20/20 premiere in 1978, for example, was a catastrophe on the order of the Titanic or the Michael Dukakis campaign; and PrimeTime Live in its early months was so inglorious an effort that it almost wrecked Diane Sawyer's budding ABC career. ("A sonata for harp and jackhammer," Sawyer called the cacaphonous music she and co-anchor Sam Donaldson were making.) But both of those programs now have large and loyal audiences. And Nightline, whi emerged from the chrysalis of the Iran hostage crisis, has become - as Gunther correctly calls it - "the most significant addition to television news since 60 Minutes." Its weeklong programs from South Africa and the Holy Land, for example, were models of comprehensive reporting.

Thus did Arledge confute his critics. ABC News, however, did not automatically become a haven of happy campers. Warfare among the division's feifdoms to please a remote and demanding monarch has often been bitter. Once, Barbara Walters asked Katherine Hepburn to cancel a PrimeTime Live interview with Sawyer and do one with her instead for 20/20. On other occasions, Gunther says, Walters protested Sawyer's pursuit of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and John Hinckley, Jr., the man who tried to kill President Reagan. "I felt I was being neglected in News," Walters is quoted as saying. "We all felt on 20/20 - all of us - that PrimeTime, because it was new and struggling, got all the attention, the ads, the promotions. I was bringing in all this money, and I was sort of taken for granted." She felt unloved if Arledge failed to telephone her after an exceptionally good interview. "Every one of us has been hurt by him," she says. "There's nothing mean about Roone. But he can be cold." Such intramural discontents noithstanding, ABC News became (as it repeatedly points out) the source from which more Americans get their news than any other.

The House That Roone Built describes that saga with satisfyingly talmudic precision. Gunther has labored to get ABC News kremlinology straight, and his interpretations appear largely sound. What one misses, if anything, is context. In 1989, the centerpiece of a lavish ABC News promotional campaign was a photograph - intended for billboards, print ads, and bus shelters - of of the network's news stars, dubbed The Magnificent Seven: Jennings, Koppel, Donaldson, Walters, Sawyer, Brinkley, and Hugh Downs. The first team. The varsity. The phalanx. A dyspeptic critic might seize on that photograph as a metaphor for how television news has evolved in forty years. Downs, after all, makes no claim to being a journalist, and he, like Brinkley, is a part-timer at the network. Walters and Sawyer have been called - not altogether justifiably - "personalities," "dabblers," and not real journalists engaged systematically in the thorny geopolitical issues of the day. A photograph of a different Seven, chosen not entirely atandom, might display the faces of Murrow, Sevareid, Collingwood, Shirer, Schoenbrun, Burdette, and LaSeuer.

A useful meditation might be: How did the concerns - as well as the talents and the passions - of those earlier news people differ from those of the current varsity news teams at ABC, CBS, and NBC? How has the texture of broadcast news changed in an era in which some of the most-reported news stories in any given week are about Tonya Harding, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Heidi Fleiss, Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbitt, and Marla Maples, and TV newsmagazines proudly promote features on Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Menendez brothers? According to one survey (by the Center for Media and Public Affairs), crime news on the major networks, including the coverage of murder, increased drastically in 1993 - although government statistics show no appreciable rise in either overall crime or violent crime rates. Entertainment news on the networks got more airtime (by far) than South Africa, education, or the environment. Is that journalism or pandering? Just asking.

Perhaps the interests and demographics of the television audience have shifted so dramatically in recent decades that TV news organizations - like it or not - must follow public enthusiasm rather than lead it, in order to compete successfully for an increasingly fractionized audience. But I doubt it. In the 1970s, CBS News president Richard Salant issued a book of standards that declared: "We in broadcast journalism cannot, should not, and will not base our judgments on what we think the viewers and listeners are most interested' in .... Our job is to give people not what they want but what they ought to have."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe