Arledge was good, but he wasn’t God

The Wide World of Roone has just gotten wider.

What is it about eulogies? Why can’t we celebrate the dead for who they were instead of for who they weren’t? It’s as if the reality of their lives was not good enough, making it necessary to wrap them in gauzy, feel-good fantasy.

That was true for Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. Only after she died did we learn from teary media mourners that Diana was America’s “princess of hearts.� Only after his death did we learn from the same black-creped TV crowd that Kennedy was “America’s prince,� which happens also to be the title of a new TBS movie about him.

Now comes Roone Arledge, the media royal who died Thursday at age 71. Arledge left deep footprints in television, first as vice president and later president of ABC Sports, then as head of ABC News.

But not this deep.

“The man who invented the way we watch TV has died,� KABC anchor Marc Brown read from a TelePrompTer on Thursday night. Oh, please. Why not go ahead and say he invented TV itself?

Which Michael Eisner, chief executive of ABC owner Disney, came close to doing on Thursday’s “Nightline,� saying Arledge had “created modern television.� Didn’t Oprah do that?

“A force of nature,� perhaps. That’s what ABC’s Ted Koppel called Arledge at the top of “Nightline’s� affectionate but mostly measured tribute to his former boss. But the Creator, the Supreme Being responsible for all of television as well as thunderbolts. The Big Fella himself?

Some people at ABC should get a grip.

There was more of this earlier when Charles Gibson, host of ABC’s “Primetime Thursday,� announced that Arledge had “reinvented television news.� And on Friday a front-page headline in this newspaper said he “revolutionized the coverage� of news and sports.

Sports, all right. But news, no way. Instead, some of his eulogizers have reinvented hyperbole.

Give Arledge credit. Lots of it. He was, indeed, a visionary of great influence, one whose legacy was profound and largely positive. Even if he did stumble from time to time. And even if ABC’s Summer Olympics coverage did jingoistically unfurl itself like Old Glory under his leadership, a flag-waving tradition later extended by the Patrick Henrys at NBC.

It was Arledge, after all, who gave America “ABC’s Wide World of Sports� and groundbreaking “Monday Night Football,� and personally snipped the umbilical cord on newborn instant replay and slow-motion replay so that viewers for years to come could see every play again and again and ... please, not again.

He also knew talent. He realized there was much more to Howard Cosell than IQ, arrogance, ego and nastiness. He created “World News Tonight� and saw that Peter Jennings could become a major star with credibility as its anchor. He was also master of the clone. Grabbing the coattails of “60 Minutes� -- which was created by Don Hewitt at CBS, let’s not forget -- he fashioned the second most influential TV magazine in history, and named it “20/20.�

He didn’t create Koppel, but it was under Arledge’s watch that “Nightline� surfaced and became a late-night institution, building on the ratings momentum from the Iran hostage crisis.

But reinvent TV news? Revolutionize it? Hardly.

If anyone did that in the last 20 to 25 years it was Ted Turner, whose creation of CNN and its companion “Headline News� forged a 24-hour news cycle that put information on a perilous racetrack with hairpin curves. The result? A redirecting of the rest of daily journalism to meet the challenge of the CNN beast, which acquired its own competitors on the 24-hour news front. If not for Turner, in other words, there would be no MSNBC or Fox News Channel and thus, no Bill O’Reilly.

That’s reinvention. That’s revolution.

And that metamorphosis will expand should reports be true about ABC News being on the verge of a cost-cutting merger with CNN that would shrink news diversity and be a terrible thing for journalism and the nation.

One wonders how Arledge would have responded to that.

His resume is already so vast and thick, why do some feel the need to add a faux sheen? “Nightline� has been great for America, and Barbara Walters could make even Saddam Hussein cry. When it comes to TV news coverage from the drafting board on up, however, Turner’s asterisk will loom largest.