Barbara Walters.
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Barbara Walters, the television broadcasting pioneer who blazed a trail for girls in a male-dominated medium, died on Friday. She was 93 years old.
Her death was confirmed by her representative, Cindi Berger, who said Walters died “peacefully at her home, surrounded by family members.”
“She lived her life without regrets,” Berger said. “She was a pioneer not just for female journalists, but for all women.”
ABC, the network where she most recently worked, aired a special report Friday night announcing Walters’ death and reflecting on her profession. Bob Iger, CEO of ABC’s parent Walt Disney Company, said in an announcement that Walters died Friday night at her Recent York residence.
He called her “a pioneer not only of women in journalism, but of journalism itself.”
Walters was known lately because the co-creator and matriarch of ABC’s hit daytime show The View, but older viewers remember her as the primary network news anchor and outstanding TV interviewer. She earned this popularity for her penchant for meticulous preparation, whether she interviewed despots, divas, models or murderers.
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“I accomplish that much homework that I do know more about this person than they learn about themselves,” Walters said on a 2014 TV show.
This motivation turned out to be crucial to her success. When she broke into business as a author on NBC’s “TODAY” in 1961, the thought of a girl sitting around interviewing a sitting president on prime-time network television (which she did just over a decade later) seemed more fantasy than reality in an industry dominated by by people like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
“She was playing in a field that was an old boy network, literally and figuratively, and he or she didn’t take no for a solution,” Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told NBC. News before Walters’ death.
“In some unspecified time in the future, things that were a burden on her, being a girl trying to realize a foothold in a male-dominated industry, began to change into more of an asset,” Thompson said. “She was smart and ready, but at the identical time seemed more compassionate (than her peers).
“Barbara Walters turned out to be an evolutionary step between Edward R. Murrow and Oprah Winfrey.”
Contact with celebrities in childhood
In a way, Walters spent her life preparing for these interviews. Born in Boston on September 25, 1929, Barbara Jill Walters got to know the wealthy and famous because the daughter of impresario Lou Walters, who owned clubs all around the East Coast.
“I’ve learned that celebrities are people,” Walters said in 2014. “I never thought of a star as someone so perfect and wonderful that I needs to be discouraged.”
Inheriting her father’s passion, Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in English and started journalism as an assistant at NBC affiliate WRCA-TV. In 1955, she married businessman Robert Henry Katz, but her old flame remained her fledgling profession. The couple divorced three years later.
Hired as a author and researcher for “TODAY”, Walters grew as much as be the one female producer on the show and started appearing on the air on occasion as “TODAY Girl”, a reporter reserved for fashion shows, lifestyle trends and the weather that had previously handled, amongst others Florence Henderson known from the “Brady Bunch”.
It wasn’t the type of hard reporting Walters clearly aspired to.
Off the air, Walters married theater producer Lee Guber in 1963, with whom she adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, named after Walters’ older sister, who was developmentally disabled. The wedding was to last 13 years.
Big breakthrough
Her big breakthrough was when she was tasked to travel with Jacqueline Kennedy on the primary lady’s trip to India in 1962. This led to more novelties and an elevated status as co-host with Hugh Downs—although she didn’t receive an official title until 1974. Right now, Downs left the network and was replaced by Frank McGee.
McGee, who died shortly after becoming Walters’ partner, demanded that he ask three inquiries to each Walter in studio interviews. In any case, he was an actual journalist.
Subsequently, Walters began giving interviews outside the studio, quickly gaining a popularity as an astute and inquisitive questioner.
People were watching—including the administrators of rival chains. Walters was lured to ABC to change into the primary female co-host of a prime-time news program with an unprecedented annual salary of $1 million. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for viewers to sense the stress between Walters and co-host Harry Reasoner, who didn’t hassle to cover his contempt for this former “TODAY Girl” who was billed as her equal.
Her newfound celebrity also received the best honor: her struggles with pronouncing the hard R were ridiculed by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live. Walters later admitted that she didn’t find the “Baba Wawa” sketches funny.
With the rankings of her ABC news program a disappointment, Walters’ profession was saved by the special interviews she began with ABC. Her first interview was with President-elect Jimmy Carter, and inside a yr she managed to conduct a joint interview with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat – a yr before their historic peace treaty.
In 1979, she reunited with Downs on the ABC News magazine show “20/20”, starting a successful 25-year series.
Interviews
But it surely was her interviews that remained Walters’ passion, putting together her mix of difficult and fun questions on her trademark 3×5 flashcards and fussing over the order whilst the cameras began rolling. In a 2014 TV special celebrating her retirement from TV journalism, Walters showed an autographed photo of Cuban despot Fidel Castro hanging on her wall: “For the longest and hardest interview I’ve ever given in my life.”
Although Walters received much criticism for asking Katherine Hepburn, “What kind of tree are you?” – frankly, a continuation of something the legendary actor said – she could ask the hardest questions, like looking Russian President Vladimir Putin in the attention and asking him if he ever ordered the killing of a rival.
Her exclusive interview with Monica Lewinsky in 1999 earned the very best rankings ever for a primetime interview. In 1997, Walters debuted a latest show that was closer to her “TODAY” roots: an all-female morning talk show called “The View”. When she was co-executive producer and sat at the table, she selected Meredith Vieira as the primary moderator.
Through the years, panelists on the hit show have included Whoopi Goldberg, Star Jones, Lisa Ling, Joy Behar, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie O’Donnell and Meghan McCain.
While Walters largely avoided the controversy of her long profession, she caused a stir when she discovered she had an affair with Senator Edward Brooke, R-Mass, within the Seventies.
After nearly 60 years in journalism, Walters announced her retirement in 2014.
“I don’t desire to be on one other show or climb one other mountain,” she said. “I would like to take a seat in a sunny field as an alternative and admire the very talented women – and okay, some men too – who will take my place.”