Pioneering TV Exec Roone Arledge Dies
Former ABC News president Roone Arledge, one of the most influential and innovative executives in television history, died Thursday at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He was 71.
The cause of death was complications from cancer, ABC News reported.
During his 38 years at ABC, Arledge transformed the way television covered both sports and news, reports CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather.
Beginning at ABC Sports in 1960, Arledge created such groundbreaking programs as "Monday Night Football," featuring celebrity sportscasters and such innovations as instant replay, and "Wide World of Sports," bringing the "thrill of victory" and "the agony of defeat" into America's living rooms.
In 1977, Arledge was named president of ABC News, and once again he delivered ideas that worked, including sports-style graphics to amplify and illustrate news reports, and "Nightline," which evolved from ABC's late-night coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis.
By the time he retired in 1998, Arledge had won 36 Emmys and was named one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine.
"Roone Arledge revolutionized television and with it the way people see and understand the world," ABC News President David Westin said in a statement. "He was our leader and our friend, and we will miss his passion and his will to make us all better than we were."
Roone Pinckney Arledge was born July 8, 1931, and reared on Long Island. The Columbia College graduate joined ABC Sports as a producer in 1960 after a five-year stint at NBC.
Appealing to his bosses to bring showbiz to sports, the 29-year-old was given control of ABC's NCAA football broadcasts. Through the 1960s, he introduced innovations taken for granted today: slow-motion and freeze- frame views, instant replays, hand-held cameras and the placement of microphones to bring the sound of sports into living rooms.
Arledge became president of ABC Sports in 1968 and supervised coverage of 10 Olympic Games from 1964 to 1988, including the memorable 1972 games in Munich disrupted by a terrorist attack in which a somber Jim McKay delivered the news of the deaths of the Israeli athletes. Arledge expanded Olympics broadcasts beyond the competition by including personal profiles of athletes.
He was the first to demand that networks, not sports leagues, approve announcers — a philosophy that led to his hiring of Howard Cosell, the abrasive New Yorker who was probably the most famous sportscaster ever.
"His intuitive genius, that sixth sense that told him what would or wouldn't play on television, was never more apparent than when we first worked together in the 1960s," Cosell wrote in his autobiography "I Never Played the Game."
The reaction was harsh, though, when Arledge was selected in 1977 to resuscitate ABC's struggling news division while still running sports.
"People in news were outraged that I hadn't been a reporter or worked my way up. The newspaper articles were brutal," he later recalled.
Under his watch, ABC created, after disastrous starts, the newsmagazines "20/20" and "Prime Time Live." He lured David Brinkley to ABC and installed him on "This Week," reviving the Sunday political talk genre.
When terrorists seized Americans hostages in Iran in 1979, Arledge seized an 11:30 p.m. time slot from ABC's affiliates for young correspondent Ted Koppel to deliver nightly updates. He never gave it back, and the updates evolved into "Nightline," which is still on the air today.
"I took two divisions whose reputations were lower than low – ABC Sports wasn't even paying its bills, and ABC News was so far behind NBC and CBS they weren't even taken seriously – and I built them into the best in the world," he said.