RIP Barbara Walters

[Steve Timko]

ABC reported it. Haven't seen a link yet.

[Steve Timko]

On the ABC Facebook page.

https://fb.watch/hLml3iUdJ0/

[Kevin M.]

One of my favorite interviews from the Late Late Show with Tom Snyder. He and Walters had great rapport. 

https://youtu.be/1dFjYoy5nNw

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[PGage]

I’m old enough to have watched her on the Today Show. She had a long and successful career in a field and time when the deck was stacked against women, so good on her. Still, the truth is her legacy is the acceleration of the slide of News toward Entertainment. Her real skill I suppose was booking big name guests to interview, which is a component of journalism; but she didn’t do as much with that access as one might expect from even an average journalist. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/12/30/barbara-walters-tv-dies/

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[Kevin M.]

Oh, as a journalist she was dreadful… bad beyond description. But as an interviewer and a broadcaster, she was among the best of her generation. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[PGage]

I was never that impressed with the quality of her interviews. They were showy and self dramatizing. She interviewed a lot of interesting people, so it often made for some must see TV (Castro, or the Shah of Iran, or Vaclav Havel), but usually the feeling one was left with was that of missed opportunity. Yes, she made famous people cry (or get to the verge of doing so), but one thing I always emphasize to young therapists is that getting people to cry is not an accomplishment in itself, or a marker of a particularly impactful encounter. Given how much pain the average human being walks around with, it is more remarkable that we are not constantly crying all the time. For substantive interviews I would go to Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, or really any of the classic 60 Minutes interviewers, over Walters.

I guess I do not dispute that she was one of the great broadcasters, a category that includes her spirit child Oprah.

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[Steve Timko]

I think the Barbara Walters interviews had mixed results. Some were spectacular. A lot were snorefests. And anyone who has watched “Broadcast News” can tell you that in television a lot of the success of the on-air personality is due to the “little people” behind the scenes. Her better interviews may have been because of a better supporting crew.
Asking Katherine Hepburn what kind of tree she was really didn’t advance interviewing much, although it gave Hepburn a chance for a clever response.
https://youtu.be/M_X2Xd1iOmM
The problem with that question is that it gave license to other journalists to attempt stupid questions under the guise of trying to dig deeper. A mediocre TV journalist in Reno did that in the 1990s.
Here is my exclusive observation. It seems Walters’ best interviews were with people who needed her, people in trouble who needed to address an issue to fix damage. The worst were people who Walters needed just for celebrity to bring in the ratings. Those were boring, self-indulgent interviews.

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[Melissa P]

I'm sure she must be the reason I continue to watch The Today Show.

Because when I was growing up, my father appreciated seeing a successful Jewish woman on TV.

I assume I'll always have The Today Show habit.  When I was in New York recently, I hung out on the Plaza and even had my picture taken with Hoda, Savannah, and Craig.  Wish I had remembered to thank Savannah for her "crazy uncle" reference to Trump.