But Walters (who announced her retirement from TV this morning) has long since passed the point when most broadcasters hang up the microphone. Indeed, as we've previously noted, she was running out of people to interview as she already got most of the "gets."
The retirement of Barbara Walters effectively ends the age of women news pioneers. She is the last of the first generation -- the newswomen who broke new ground. But let's not forget some of the original TV newswomen such as Nancy Dickerson, Pauline Frederick and May Craig. All of them preceded Barbara Walters and made their mark in TV news. Though they've passed on now, they laid the groundwork for the likes of Walters who became a TV powerhouse.
From a New Yorker profile/book review of TV legend Barbara Walters:
Walters is, along with Mike Wallace, among the few remaining on-air television journalists whose careers encompass almost the entire history of television news. Before broadcast news emerged from the primordial ooze and separated itself from entertainment and commerce and opinion, just about everybody in front of the camera did a little of just about everything. Walters hawked Alpo on the air, assisted by live dogs. She got her big break, a full-time job on NBC’s “Today” show, in 1961, as a writer for a long-forgotten beauty named Anita Colby, who had a five-minute segment on the show that was sponsored by S & H Green Stamps and was devoted to fashion, makeup, and entertaining. Walters, whose first ambition was to be an actress and who had a couple of early jobs in public relations, became a journalist by accident, when NBC moved “Today” from the entertainment to the news division and a sympathetic boss decreed that she could write for all segments of the show. Her transition to on-air personality came by accident, too, when, after a few short, unplanned fill-ins, she got herself assigned to Paris to cover the fashion shows . . .
As she has gone from being well known to being famous and on to being an inescapable, if easily parodied, national monument, Walters has taken the reporter-source relationship to a strange new place. While Oprah Winfrey, who declared as a contestant in a teen-age pageant that Walters was who she wanted to be like when she grew up, can no longer pull off the act of being in a position inferior to those she interviews, Walters can, somehow. She also gets to offer her own opinions and feelings and to act as a combination of loving but gimlet-eyed mom and one-woman embodiment of American public opinion.
And here's what we had to say in 2008 about Barbara Walters' autobiography titled Audition:
If you haven't gotten your hands on this book, don't delay.Audition is an incredible story - a story that you will hardly believe.
But it certainly has the ring of truth on page after page after page. And it most assuredly is a page turner. You will find yourself engrossed as the chapters roll along.
I rarely talk about a book before I've finished reading it and I almost never post anything here about a book until then.
But this is no ordinary bio.
This is obviously the story - the whole story - that Barbara has been saving all these years.
The back cover of the book shows Barbara taking a bow, apparently at the Emmy Awards.
She takes a bow in this book as well. But it's not the usual, quick, cosmetic bow of a performer. It's an honest, open and complete bow with everything right out there; everything laid on the line. It's a bow in the name of endurance.
This is gutsy, real, compelling. Don't miss it!
BTW: Barbara Walter's birth year is variously listed as 1929 or 1931. In her book, the exact year of her birth is one of the things she does not reveal. Sorry!
Update: Today, in the announcement of her retirement Barbara Walters is said to be 83. So, that would make the 1931 date the wrong date. Hey, a lady's got a right to try to shave a couple of years off her age, yes?
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