The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story of ABC News is an interesting and enlightening book. As the title suggests, the primary focus of the book is Roone Arledge, who served as the president of ABC News for nearly two decades. However, Marc Gunther also devotes many pages to the lives and careers of several of the biggest stars of television news, including such household names as Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, Barbara Walters, and Ted Koppel. Still, it is Arledge who gets most of the attention in the book. This is for good reason, for Arledge not only changed the way news was handled at ABC, his influence forever altered the way news would be shown on television altogether.

            When ABC hired Roone Arledge in 1965, it was not for the network’s news division but rather its sports division. Arledge soon became committed to making a big splash at ABC Sports, and indeed he did. As Gunther points out, Arledge, as president of ABC Sports, revolutionized the way sporting events were broadcast on television. This may sound like a bold statement, but, in actuality, it is not. Arledge standardized the use of several techniques in the world of sports television, such as the instant replay. One of Arledge’s most significant creations while at ABC Sports was the creation of the program Monday Night Football. Not only did this program first showcase football in prime time, it also marked the first time three sports anchors were used in a broadcast booth. Since that time, a three-person broadcast booth has become commonplace, not only in football but in other sports as well. Arledge also introduced the concept of paying large amounts of money to secure the broadcasting rights to various sporting events, and he is largely responsible for the Olympics being as popular on television as they currently are.

            Yet all this was not enough for Arledge; he felt he needed a new challenge. He stated that he would like to be president of the news division at ABC, as well as its sports division, and on May 2, 1977, he got his wish, and became the new president of ABC News, and was also allowed to remain president of ABC Sports. By this time, ABC had become the number one entertainment network in the country, due to the huge success of such shows as Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Three’s Company. However, the evening news program at ABC struggled mightily, ranking far below the news programs at NBC and CBS. Arledge was hired in the hopes that his success in ABC Sports would carry over to its news division. The ABC brass would not be disappointed.

            One of the first things Arledge did as president of ABC News was address the anchor problem of the evening newscast. It was obvious that Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters, the anchors of the evening newscast, not only had little chemistry but also had little regard for each other. When Reasoner left the network in 1978, that left Arledge free to revamp the newscast. Walters, who had an unpleasant experience anchoring the news, was assigned to do various news specials and interviews, and Arledge redesigned and renamed the evening newscast. World News Tonight, as it was now called, featured three anchors: Peter Jennings in London; Frank Reynolds in Washington; and Max Robinson in Chicago. While the anchor format didn’t work out, other elements Alredge devised for World News Tonight did. ABC, due to its huge success with its entertainment programs, supplied Alredge with a hefty budget, and he made good use of it. He decided to instill graphics and theme music onto World News Tonight, neither of which had ever been done before on any newscasts, and both of which soon became standard on the other network newscasts. Also, slowly but surely, World News Tonight’s ratings began to rise.

            Of course, World News Tonight was not Arledge’s only success story. In 1978, noticing how popular 60 Minutes had become for CBS, Arledge devised the newsmagazine 20/20. After a disastrous debut (Gunther reveals that the inaugural episode featured a clay doll of President Jimmy Carter singing ‘Georgia on my Mind’), 20/20 eventually became a hit, due to such anchors and correspondents as Hugh Downs, Geraldo Rivera, and Barbara Walters. A series of fifteen-minute specials about the crisis in Iran led to the creation of Nightline in 1979. Nightline, television’s first attempt at a late-night news program, also got off to a slow start, but, thanks to anchor Ted Koppel, became a hit and also proved that there is an audience for news late at night. One of Alredge’s biggest coups came in 1981, when he hired David Brinkley away from NBC, where he had been a big star of that network’s evening newscasts. Rather than supplanting Peter Jennings on  World News Tonight, Alredge created a Sunday morning news show for him, entitled This Week with David Brinkley, which quickly became the highest-rated of the network newscasts. Alredge had become a hit.

            However, his status with the network changed in 1985, when Capital Cities bought ABC. By this time, ABC was no longer a hit entertainment network, and while the news division was still going strong, Capital Cities wanted to cut costs. Arledge did everything he could to avoid making cuts to the budget, but he eventually had to make a few. Still, Capital Cities kept on pressing him to make more. Arledge and Capital Cities battled for several years (during which time Arledge developed another newsmagazine, PrimeTime Live), but Capital Cities eventually won out, and gradually began to phase Arledge out. Arledge still retained the presidency of ABC News, but a lot of his duties were given to an executive vice president whom Capital Cities had appointed. The book concludes with Arledge reluctantly signing a new contract with ABC News in 1993, one that would eventually remove him from the presidency outright.

            Overall, The House That Roone Built is a very entertaining book. While Gunther praises Arledge throughout the book, it is not blind praise. Gunther points out some of Arledge’s negative qualities, such as his overpowering desire to receive credit for every project of ABC News, even in cases when he was not fully involved with the project. The book also mentions that Arledge would sometimes not participate in projects he predicted would fail, for he did not want to be blamed for the failure. Yet when the projects would succeed, Arledge would often take the credit. As a whole, however, Gunther depicts Arledge in a positive light.

This positive praise, in fact, is one of the faults of the book. Serving as president of both ABC News and ABC Sports must have been a daunting task to Arledge, and it is obvious to readers that Arledge focused far more on his news division than his sports division. Yet Gunther blatantly avoids the topic of ABC Sports. Surely some people in the sports division must have been angry over Alredge’s neglecting of ABC Sports, but Gunther does not mention it. While the book is about ABC News, and not ABC Sports, since the main focus of the book was the president of both divisions, I felt that at least some attention should have been given to problems at ABC Sports. Also, Gunther provides relatively few details about Arledge’s personal life. On a few occasions he mentions possible affairs that Arledge may have had while at ABC News, yet he never elaborates on them.

Gunther shines in his descriptions of the lives of various celebrities of ABC News. He reveals a lot about such people as Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, and Sam Donaldson, and also spends time on people no longer with ABC News, such as Harry Reasoner and Geraldo Rivera. These sections of The House That Roone Built were the most enjoyable of the book. Gunther takes these stars, many of whom are household names, and reveals their human characteristics. This is something that needed to be done, as for many people, some of these celebrities are unfortunately seen as little more than “talking heads” on various news programs. I learned things about some of these anchors I had never known, and discovered aspects of their personality that I found very intriguing. In many ways, I will never again be able to view these people in the same vein I had before I read this book. However, even here there are some faults to Gunther’s writing. For some anchors, Gunther reveals a lot about them, and for other anchors he does not. The most blatant example of this is the way Gunther deals with Max Robinson. Gunther initially deals a lot with Robinson’s problems off the camera, as well as Robinson’s charge that there was racism among the staff of ABC News. However, Gunther spends no time detailing Robinson’s departure from ABC, other than saying that he left the network in 1984. Gunther also reveals that Robinson died in 1988, and it would have been interesting to see the reaction of the staff at ABC to Robinson’s death. However, Gunther does not make reference to there even being a reaction among the staff to his death.

Again, as a whole, The House That Roone Built is an entertaining and informative read. The inner workings of the news division of a television network are explained in fine detail. Gunther also reveals a lot about the cutthroat tactics people use in network news, a lot of which Arledge, whether inadvertently or not, initiated himself. The book also explains just how important the overall profitability of the bottom line is to a network, especially when a new owner is looking to cut costs. Yet Gunther is never cynical about this, even when he makes it clear that, to some television executives, money is all that matters. In The House That Roone Built, Gunther has written a book that is very good. It just might have been better if Gunther didn’t accentuate the positive quite so much.