Barbara Walters

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Barbara Walters bigraphy, stories - Journalist, television news anchor and talk show host

Barbara Walters : biography

25 September 1929 –

Barbara Jill Walters (born September 25, 1929) is an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She has hosted morning television shows Today and The View, the television news magazine 20/20, co-anchored the ABC Evening News, and is a contributor to ABC News.

Walters first became known as a television personality when she was a writer and segment producer of "womenʻs interest stories" on the morning NBC News program The Today Show, where she began work with host Hugh Downs in 1962, once even modeling a swimsuit when an expected model did not show up. Because of her excellent interviewing ability and her popularity with the viewers, and when other women left the program, she was eventually allowed more air time. Even though her production duties made her a significant contributor to the show, she had no input in choosing a successor for Hugh Downs when he left the show in 1971. Frank McGee was hired. Although his salary was twice hers, at Frank McGeeʻs death in 1974, because of a clause added to her contract by her agent (a family friend), she acquired the title "co-host", the first woman by that title for any network news or public affairs program. Jim Hartz became her co-host. Two years later, continuing as a pioneer for women, she became the first female co-anchor of any network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC News flagship program ABC Evening News (List of ABC Evening News anchors). From 1979 to 2004, Walters worked 25 years as co-host and a producer for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20. From 1976 to 2010, she contributed as an anchor, reporter, and correspondent for ABC News, along with producing and hosting her own special interview programs several times yearly. Beginning in 1997, she has created, and appears as co-host on, The View.

In 1996, Walters was ranked #34 on the TV Guide "50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time."

Walters has announced that she will retire from ABC News and as co-host of The View in May 2014.

Books

In the late 1960s Walters wrote a magazine article, "How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything", which drew upon the kinds of things people said to her, which were often mistakes.Audition: A Memoir, pp. 186–9 Shortly after the article appeared, she received a letter from Doubleday expressing interest in expanding it into a book. Walters felt that it would help "tongue-tied, socially awkward people — the many people who worry that they can’t think of the right thing to say to start a conversation." She published the book How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything in 1970, with the assistance of ghostwriter June Callwood. Retrieved 18 October 2009. To Walters’ great surprise, the book was a phenomenon. As of 2008, it had gone through eight printings, sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, and had been translated into at least six different languages.

She published her autobiography, Audition: A Memoir, in 2008.

Books about Barbara Walters Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News, Nichola D. Gutgold. (Lexington Books, 2008)

Criticism

When Walters announced her retirement, Alex Pareene welcomed the news in Salon.com, writing that Walters had deliberately cultivated powerful friendships with unsavory public figures like Roy Cohn, George Steinbrenner, and Henry Kissinger. Pareene wrote that like Walter Winchell, Walters was “an amoral power-obsessed monster” and suffered from a “total lack of journalistic ethics” as well as a “tendency to interview her close, personal friends.”http://www.salon.com/2013/05/13/the_long_gross_career_of_barbara_walters/

S.J. Perelman once called Walters “an absolute fiend” and “the most insincere, brassy nitwit in the business.”http://books.google.com/books?id=VUZbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22insincere,+brassy+nitwit%22&dq=%22insincere,+brassy+nitwit%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=f9CfUYCUFMjArAeQwIG4Aw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA