Barbara Walters, 1929-2022
The trailblazing television interviewer is gone at 93.
ABC News (“Barbara Walters, trailblazing TV icon, dies at 93“):
Barbara Walters, the trailblazing television news broadcaster and longtime ABC News anchor and correspondent who shattered the glass ceiling and became a dominant force in an industry once dominated by men, died Friday. She was 93.
Walters joined ABC News in 1976, becoming the first female anchor on an evening news program. Three years later, she became a co-host of “20/20,” and in 1997, she launched “The View.”
Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company which is the parent company of ABC News, praised Walters as someone who broke down barriers.
“Barbara was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself. She was a one-of-a-kind reporter who landed many of the most important interviews of our time, from heads of state to the biggest celebrities and sports icons. I had the pleasure of calling Barbara a colleague for more than three decades, but more importantly, I was able to call her a dear friend. She will be missed by all of us at The Walt Disney Company, and we send our deepest condolences to her daughter, Jacqueline,” Iger said in a statement Friday.
In a career that spanned five decades, Walters won 12 Emmy awards, 11 of those while at ABC News.
She made her final appearance as a co-host of “The View” in 2014, but remained an executive producer of the show and continued to do some interviews and specials for ABC News.
“I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain,” she said at the time. “I want instead to sit on a sunny field and admire the very gifted women — and OK, some men too — who will be taking my place.”
New York Times (“Barbara Walters, a First Among TV Newswomen, Is Dead at 93“):
Barbara Walters, who broke barriers for women as the first female co-host of the “Today” show and the first female anchor of a network evening news program, and who as an interviewer of celebrities became one herself, helping to blur the line between news and entertainment, died on Friday. She was 93.
Her death was reported by ABC News, where she was a longtime anchor and a creator of the talk show “The View.” Her publicist, Cindi Berger, said in an interview that Ms. Walters died at her home in Manhattan surrounded by loved ones. She did not give a cause.
Ms. Walters spent more than 50 years in front of the camera and, until she was 84, continued to appear on “The View.” In one-on-one interviews, she was best known for delving, with genteel insistence, into the private lives and emotional states of movie stars, heads of state and other high-profile subjects.
Ms. Walters first made her mark on the “Today” show on NBC, where she began appearing regularly on camera in 1964; she was officially named co-host a decade later. Her success kicked open the door for future network anchors like Jane Pauley, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.
Ms. Walters began at NBC as a writer in 1961, the token woman in the “Today” writers’ room. When she left NBC for ABC in 1976 to be a co-anchor of the evening news with Harry Reasoner, she became known as the “million-dollar baby” because of her five-year, $5 million contract.
The move to the co-anchor’s chair made her not only the highest-profile female journalist in television history, but also the highest-paid news anchor, male or female, and her arrival signaled something of a cultural shift: the moment when news anchors began to be seen less as infallible authority figures, in the Walter Cronkite mold, and more as celebrities. A disgruntled Mr. Reasoner privately dismissed her hiring as a gimmick.
Gimmick or not, the ABC experiment failed. Chemistry between the co-anchors was nonexistent, ratings remained low, and in 1978 Mr. Reasoner left for CBS, his original television home, and Ms. Walters’s role changed from co-anchor to contributor as the network instituted an all-male multiple-anchor format. Shortly after that she began contributing reports to ABC’s newsmagazine show “20/20.” In 1984 she became the show’s permanent co-host alongside Hugh Downs, her old “Today” colleague.
But it was her “Barbara Walters Specials” more than anything else that made her a star, enshrining her as an indefatigable chronicler of the rich, the powerful and the infamous. The specials, which began in 1976, made Ms. Walters as famous, or nearly as famous, as the people she interviewed.
At a time when politicians tended to be reserved and celebrities elusive, Ms. Walters coaxed kings, presidents and matinee idols to answer startlingly intimate questions. She asked Jimmy Carter, shortly after he won the 1976 presidential election, if he and his wife slept in separate beds. (They did not.) She asked Prime Minister Morarji Desai of India whether it was true that he drank his own urine for medicinal purposes. (It was.)
Ms. Walters was a celebrity journalist who reveled in the role — driving a motorcycle with Sylvester Stallone, dancing the mambo with Patrick Swayze, riding a patrol boat with Fidel Castro across the Bay of Pigs. She was the reporter who urged Mr. Carter to “be good to us” and asked the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky — in an interview that attracted some 50 million viewers — why she kept that stained blue dress that had figured in the sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton.
Throughout her career Ms. Walters raised eyebrows — and competitors’ ire — by courting high society and cultivating friendships with high-placed officials. The Shah of Iran was a friend; so were Roy Cohn and Brooke Astor. She was the only female television reporter on President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. When the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan died in 1981, Ms. Walters lent his wife, Raquel, a black dress for the funeral.
Her ambition and competitive spirit never let up. She was in Vietnam on vacation when Michael Jackson died in 2009, and sped across 8,000 miles and many time zones to sit with the Jackson family at the memorial in Los Angeles — and to host a special tribute on “20/20.” She continued to pop up in the gossip pages, notably when she tried to intervene in a vitriolic spat between her “View” colleague Rosie O’Donnell and Donald J. Trump in 2007.
[…]
“The View” was yet another ratings triumph for Ms. Walters, who created it with Bill Geddie and served as an executive producer in addition to frequently appearing on camera as a member of the show’s all-female panel, which over the years also included Whoopi Goldberg, Meredith Vieira and many others. The show, which is in its 24th season, is now seen in several countries and has inspired imitations.
[…]
From 1981 to 2010, she presented an annual Oscar-night special that included interviews with nominees and other celebrities. When she announced that the 2010 Oscar special would be her last, she explained that celebrity interviews had become ubiquitous — and that celebrities were not what they used to be.
[…]
She did, however, continue her annual “10 Most Fascinating People” specials, which began in 1993. In the final special, in 2015, Caitlyn Jenner topped the list, but she declined to be interviewed; Ms. Jenner was already negotiating an interview with Diane Sawyer, Ms. Walters’s longtime professional rival.
Los Angeles Times (“Barbara Walters dies at 93; news anchor broke the boy’s club of network television“):
Barbara Walters, the first woman to break up the all-male club of network television anchors and one of the last remaining megastars in broadcast news who deftly coaxed world leaders and celebrities alike into revealing their secrets and deepest fears, has died.
[…]
A canny interviewer who prodded ranks of public figures into tearful confessions, Walters was an aggressive practitioner of “the get” who outmaneuvered competitors to land exclusives with figures as varied as Cuban leader Fidel Castro, actress Katharine Hepburn and White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
She made history when she was named the first female co-host of NBC’s “Today” show in 1974 and again two years later when ABC tapped her as the first female co-anchor of the network evening news. Walters faced open hostility from her male counterparts in both places, but never let it rattle her publicly, despite being shadowed by deep insecurities that she said lifted only late in her career.
“I was completely unwelcome,” she told The Times in 2008. “They didn’t want a woman, and they didn’t want me.”
Veteran network producer Av Westin, who worked with her at CBS and ABC, said Walters overcame what was a huge hurdle at the time: “To be able to plow through the resistance of a woman being accepted as more than a bit of pretty fluff — she really was the first who did that.”
Walters’ ill-matched pairing with evening anchor Harry Reasoner at ABC lasted only two years, and she went on to become a power player at the network as co-host of the prime-time news magazine “20/20,” a post she held for a quarter-century. Her creation of “The View,” the daytime talk show she co-hosted until 2014, gave her another prominent perch.
But Walters was perhaps most familiar to viewers with her “Barbara Walters Specials,” in which she quizzed entertainers such as Elizabeth Taylor, George Clooney and Michael Jackson about their personal lives, drawing them out with a mix of chumminess and relentlessness. Times television critic Mary McNamara said Walters was part confessor, part therapist and succeeded brilliantly at making “emotion newsworthy.”
Her ability to reinvent herself with the times made her a singular figure in the media: an octogenarian deeply immersed in current celebrity culture.
She moved in the same bold-faced social set as the movie stars and political leaders she interviewed, leading some critics to suggest that she pulled her punches in interviews to avoid offending friends. Walters insisted that her personal relationships never got in the way of her job, but was unapologetic about the amiable tone she had with interview subjects in her prime-time specials.
Walters has been on television longer than I’ve been alive, with her “Today” stint beginning the year before I was born. While I was aware of her pioneering stint as co-anchor at ABC News, I doubt I ever saw her on it as we were a Walter Cronkite family. We did, though, watch the “20/20” news magazine show regularly and I certainly saw a lot of her interview specials. To the extent I watched “The View,” it was by accident—when it happened to be on somewhere.
She broke the mold in so many ways. Most obviously, she pioneered women in prominent roles in television news. But she is also perhaps the on-air personality most responsible for blurring and ultimately shattering the barrier between news and entertainment, at least in prime time. (The morning shows like “Today” have always been soft.) Her celebrity specials lent the gravitas of a news anchor to something that was decidedly not hard news.
Despite all the sexism she faced along the way, she managed to defy the early trend of women in media being put out to pasture early. Despite her insistence otherwise, she was a beautiful woman early in her career. He she is in 1964:
She was already 35 at that point. By the time she took the co-anchor chair at ABC, she was 47. She was already 50 when she debuted “20/20” (which, granted, was still 8 years younger than he co-host, Hugh Downs) and 68 when she started “The View.” She was nearly 85 when she finally retired for good.
The fact that he is still living at age 99 is more proof that karma does not exist.