The House that Roone Built

A few years ago a local bookstore was going out of business and I bought several fat hard-bound books; books I might not ordinarily have chosen for reading matter.

I just finished reading one of those books, The House that Roone Built: the Inside Story of ABC News. I'm not sure why I picked up this book, except that I had happened to catch the funeral service for Roone Arledge on C-Span. The book published in 1984 describes the highlights of Roone's career at ABC and in the process, as the title indicates, give you an inside view of ABC news.

Did I have any particular interest in ABC news? Well, yes. For one, I had a sort of celebrity crush on Peter Jennings, and too I have watched a good bit of ABC news. Certainly much more than CBS or NBC news.

At one time I watched only PBS news. This was because I didn't have cable and I could only get two stations with my rabbit ears (yeah, with the coat hangers and foil). And it was a hassle to change between the two stations and realign the antennae. I usually stuck with PBS. I think ABC may have been the other channel, I don't remember for sure.

As for PBS's Newshour: one thing I really liked then and still appreciate is that there are no commercial interruptions. Among other things this means that they have time to go into stories in depth. On the other hand maybe I'm not really that deep! I find my mind often wanders listening to "talking heads" on PBS (or anywhere). Sometimes I would try really hard to make myself focus; only sometimes successfully.

Since I'm discussing news, I could mention that I also used to have a subscription to Time Magazine at the time. In the beginning I tried to read it from cover to cover. I found that this required that I have a dictionary at my side. That's cool, beef up my vocabulary. However, I finally realized even armed with a dictionary there was no way I could keep up reading all of the stories. The longer stories sometimes seemed to be not that substantial once I had deciphered the big words. Some interested me but didn't seem so important. I think I liked most the editorial posts. They were generally short and unambiguously biased.

And I used to get the Sunday paper too. I would save all of the issues of all of my magazine subscriptions (non-news varieties as well) and the Sunday papers (well I am a pack-rat of long-standing). And I would try to stay informed about the news. I don't think I was very successful really. I always read the funnies first. I would look at the pictures, generally scan the headlines and read what interested me. I'm not sure how much "news" I was really taking in.

In truth I fear I may have just the sort of short attention span that most of the news broadcasts seem to pander to.

If on the one hand, I do find myself getting frustrated when I hear a short blurb about something, maybe one or two sentences and on to another subject. It often seems I'm still wondering about the last story and then miss the next one. For one thing, I'm thinking why did they even mention that; I don't really know much more than before I heard the blurb.

On the other hand, I have a hard time trying to keeping track of the facts of stories, who is who and what is what and listening to long discussions about stuff I can't quite follow. To be fair this is true no matter what news source I'm using.

I have thought sometimes I have some instinct for what will make a good story subject, what local stories will make the national news. I don't know what this amounts to but I do have some kind of curiosity or fascination with the whole news making process. So I guess after all that it makes sense that I would read this book.

I've been trying to figure out what kind of job I would be good at. As I was reading this book I joked to myself, maybe I should have been a network president! (Ha!)

It seems that Roone was a man with many faults. One that irritated many people was that he would not return people's phone calls. (I do that! I'm afraid I'm apt not to return phone calls. I don't even have the excuse of getting many.) He let problems go, blamed other people and was indecisive. (I can relate to that.) He had a tendency to make everything about himself. (Um well, yeah I do that pretty often). He tried things that were a big flop. He sometimes went for the showy and the sensational. In the end perhaps it was his extravagant expenditures of money that led to his being pushed into a role of figurehead. As the book describes it, that is what his being named chairman amounted to. (Spending extravagantly sounds like fun, but it hasn't been my experience). Roone retired about 4 years before he died in 2002. So, the book doesn't cover the last 4 years of his career.

He had faults and failures. But he also tried some things that worked and he recognized talent. He went after the major stories and if he spent a lot of money, he often delivered. At his funeral I recall that people were saying that he pushed people to become more than they thought they could.

I guess those are the main things I got out of reading the book. There was a lot of competitiveness and politics behind the scenes--surely no surprise. And I suppose reading this book just reinforced the reality of the humanity of our news people; those on screen whose names and faces become familiar to us, the anchors and reporters, and all of those people off-screen, the little people and the big-wigs who are behind the scenes, all of those people who are responsible for bringing the news to us.

As a sidenote:

I have had this idea for news, now that news can be kept up with on the Internet. It's kind of vaguely in my head. Someway to help people know what they really would like to know about the news, get caught up on stories they've missed. But then again maybe that's already being done. Perhaps a person can find out about just about anything that they really want to, hm, well to a certain extent anyway.