He created many programs still airing today, such as Monday Night Football, ABC World News Tonight, Nightline and 20/20.

[1] Arledge grew up in Merrick[2] and attended Wellington C. Mepham High School on Long Island where he wrestled and played baseball.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1952, Arledge enrolled in graduate studies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.

Contacts he made at DuMont paid off with a stage manager's job at NBC's New York City station, WRCA (later WNBC).

Using the avant-garde magazine Playboy as his model, Arledge convinced his superiors at WRCA to let him film a pilot of a show he called For Men Only.

But the WRCA weatherman, Pat Hernon, who hosted the pilot episode of For Men Only, began showing the kinescope to people around New York City who might want the program.

One of them was a former account executive at the ad agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, Edgar J. Scherick, who as far as Hernon knew, was doing something at ABC.

Scherick had joined the fledgling ABC television network when he persuaded it to purchase Sports Programs, Inc. Scherick had formed this company after leaving CBS when the network would not make him the head of sports programming, choosing instead Bill MacPhail, a former baseball public-relations agent.

[citation needed] Despite the production values he brought to NCAA college football, Scherick wanted low-budget (as in inexpensive broadcasting rights) sports programming that could attract and retain an audience.

So in January 1961, Scherick called Arledge into his office and asked him to attend the annual AAU board of governors meeting.

While he was shaking hands, Scherick said, if the mood seemed right, might he cut a deal to broadcast AAU events on ABC?

They then telephoned their sponsors and said in so many words, "Advertise on our new sports show coming up in April, or forget about buying commercials on NCAA college football this fall."

By exploiting the speed of jet transportation and flexibility of videotape, Scherick was able to undercut NBC and CBS's advantages in broadcasting live sporting events.

In that era, with communications nowhere near as universal as they are today, ABC was able to safely record events on videotape for later broadcast without worrying about an audience finding out the results.

Arledge, his colleague Chuck Howard, and Jim McKay (who left CBS for this opportunity) made up the show on a week-by-week basis the first year it was broadcast.

McKay's honest curiosity and reporter's bluntness gave the show an emotional appeal that attracted viewers who might not otherwise watch a sporting event.

He also presided as producer over the 1975 flop, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which director Don Mischer blamed on Arledge's inexperience with the variety show genre and indifference to the work required.

In 1983, Reynolds died of bone cancer, and Robinson departed the network, and ABC made Jennings the sole anchor of World News Tonight on September 5, 1983.

And on November 4, 1979, Frank Reynolds began anchoring a series of special reports entitled America Held Hostage.

In 1976, managing editor of The Ring, Johnny Ort fabricated records of selected boxers, to elevate them, thereby securing them lucrative fights in the United States Championship Tournament, which was promoted by Don King and sponsored by ABC Sports.

The scandal would lead to the eventual resignation of New York State Boxing Commissioner James A. Farley Jr., who had lent his name to the Championship fights.

20/20 drew criticism from the co-anchors of the program, Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, and the executive producer, Av Westin.

Two other aspects of the unaired report, according to an ABC staff member who has seen it, are eyewitness accounts of wiretapping of Miss Monroe's home by Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster leader, that reveal meetings between her and the Kennedy brothers, and accounts of a visit to Monroe by Robert F. Kennedy on the day of her death.

In addition, several people not in the book say on camera that Monroe kept diaries with references to meetings with the Kennedy brothers, according to a staff member who has seen the report.