TV & Radio

Barbara Walters (93), pioneering US television journalist, dies

First female anchor on a US network evening news broadcast became one of TV’s most prominent interviewers

Journalist Barbara Walters, pictured at her office in New York in October 1973, has died. Photograph: Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times

Sat Dec 31 2022 - 07:27

Barbara Walters, one of the most visible women on US television as the first female anchor on an American network evening news broadcast and one of TV’s most prominent interviewers, died on Friday at age 93, her longtime ABC News home said.

Ms Walters, who created the popular ABC women’s talk show The View in 1997, died at her home in New York, Robert Iger, chief executive of ABC’s corporate parent, The Walt Disney Co, said in a statement. The circumstances of her death were not given.

“Barbara was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself,” Mr Iger wrote.

In a broadcast career spanning five decades, Ms Walters interviewed an array of world leaders, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Libyan ruler Muammar Gadafy, Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and every US president and first lady since Richard and Pat Nixon.

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“I never thought I’d have this kind of a life,” Ms Walters said in a 2004 Chicago Tribune interview. “I’ve met everyone in the world. I’ve probably met more people, more heads of state, more important people, even almost than any president, because they’ve only had eight years.”

Critics of Ms Walters said she too often asked softball questions and she was long skewered for a 1981 interview in which she asked Hollywood actress Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she would like to be.

Ms Walters pointed out that she only asked because Hepburn had first compared herself to a tree.

However, she knew how to ask tough questions, too. ”I asked Yeltsin if he drank too much, and I asked Putin if he killed anybody,” Ms Walters told the New York Times in 2013. Both answered no.

Celebrity interviews also were an important part of Ms Walters’s repertoire, and for 29 years she hosted a pre-Oscars interview programme featuring Academy Award nominees. She also had an annual “most fascinating people” show but dropped it when she decided she was weary of celebrity interviews.

Ms Walters reached the top of her field despite difficulty pronouncing Rs - a trait that made her the target of a biting impersonation by Gilda Radner on the Saturday Night Live sketch comedy show in the 1970s. Ms Walters said the spoof bothered her, until her daughter told her to lighten up.

Ms Walters was born in Boston, and after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked in public relations before joining NBC’s Today show as a writer and segment producer in 1961. She began getting air time with feature stories - such as a report on her one-day stint as a Playboy bunny - and became a regular on the programme.

It was then that she began encountering resistance. Today show host Frank McGee resented her presence and tried to limit her role on the show.

After 13 years on Today, Ms Walters was given an unprecedented $1 million annual salary to move to rival network ABC in 1976 and make history as the first woman co-anchor on a US evening newscast. Her unwilling partner, Harry Reasoner, made his disdain for Ms Walters obvious even when they were on the air.

“These two men were really quite brutal to me and it was not pleasant,” she told the San Francisco Examiner. “For a long time, I couldn’t talk about that time without tears in my eyes. It was so awful to walk into that studio every day where no one would talk to me.”

Barbara Walters pictured in May 2008. Photograph: Richard Perry/The New York Times

After her unhappy run on the ABC Evening News ended in 1978, Walters established herself on the network’s prime-time news magazine show 20/20 and stayed with the program for 25 years. Being interviewed by Walters on 20/20 or on her numerous specials became a distinction - and guaranteed exposure - for her subjects.

In 1997, Walters launched The View on ABC, a popular roundtable discussion show for women that was sometimes riven by disputes with her co-hosts Star Jones and Rosie O’Donnell. She made her final appearance as co-host of the show in 2014 but remained an executive producer of the programme and continued to do occasional interviews and specials for ABC News.

Ms Walters’s three marriages - to businessman Robert Katz, theatrical producer Lee Guber and television executive Merv Adelson - ended in divorce. She also had high-profile boyfriends such as Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, and John Warner, who would later become a senator from Virginia.

Her love life made headlines in 2008 when her autobiography, Audition: A Memoir, revealed an affair with then-married Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

She earned 12 Emmy awards, 11 of those while at ABC News, the network said. – Reuters

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