This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.
On opening night, Barbara Walters recalled feeling strangely calm in the studio. She knew she could read from the teleprompter. She just prayed that she wouldn’t stumble over her words.
This was Walters’ toughest audition yet. A great deal of money had been invested in this night. Much was new — a new executive producer, new writers, even a new set. Intense pressure.
Harry Reasoner, seated beside her, spoke first.
“Good evening,” he said into the camera, his face the mark of a serious news anchor. Reasoner introduced the first major story, about the secretary of agriculture resigning over a racial joke.
A beat later, Reasoner introduced Walters.
“Closer to home, I have a new colleague to welcome. Barbara?”
She smiled and thanked him. Then the first woman to co-anchor a national news show on prime-time television turned to face the camera.
“Well, tonight has finally come for me,” a poised Walters said, “and I’m very pleased to be with you, Harry, and with ABC News. And later I’ll have a chance to comment on my new duties.”
Walters Barbara shown after opening night on the ABC evening news with her anchor partner, Harry Reasoner, on Oct. 4, 1976. (AP Photo)
Walters recalled the rest of the broadcast going smoothly — until the end. She took time to address the audience, directly into the camera, and laid out what to expect from her and Reasoner.
Walters said that people had asked if she wanted to be called an “anchorman,” “anchorwoman” or “anchorperson.” She waved off the importance of a title, reiterating that she and Reasoner would try to bring the best darn news program on the air. Her words.
“Mr. Reasoner?” Walters said when she was done, turning to him.
“Thank you, Barbara. I had a little trouble in thinking of what to say to welcome you,” Reasoner said. “Not to sound sexist as saying that you brighten up the place, or patronizing as saying that wasn’t a bad interview, or sycophantic as in, ‘How in the world do you do it?’ The decision was to welcome you as I would any respected and competent colleague of any sex, by noting that I’ve kept time on your stories and mine tonight. You owe me four minutes.”
Walters didn’t say anything, just laughed.
“From Barbara Walters and I, good night,” he said.
Later, in her memoir “Audition,” Walters wrote that she hoped Reasoner was kidding. “He wasn’t.”
It was Oct. 4, 1976 — Walters’ debut on “ABC Evening News with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters.” A moment amid second-wave feminism. An evening that forever changed the news media.
“There had been other women on TV before, like Nancy Dickerson and Pauline Frederick and others,” said Susan Page, Washington bureau chief of USA Today and author of “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.” “But no woman had ever been the co-anchor of an evening network show, which was the pinnacle of broadcast journalism then.”
That evening, Walters, who had jumped to ABC from NBC, cemented her position in history.
Claire Sanders Swift, a national media consultant and executive chairman and past president of the American News Women’s Club, said it was not easy to be a woman — let alone a co-anchor — in 1976.
“There’s an evolution of women in the news,” she said. “We weren’t even allowed to ask questions at the National Press Club until 1971. Women, we stayed behind the scenes.”
With ABC News mired in third place, the network offered Walters a then-unheard-of $1 million salary — a gamble that made headlines.
“So of course, she was immediately dubbed the ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ which she hated, and which had truly sexist overtones,” Page said. “I mean, no one would call Walter Cronkite the ‘Million Dollar Baby.’ But she finally had the job she wanted, co-anchoring with Harry Reasoner.”
For Walters, the gig was not about the money. It was about the historic offer.
Behind the cameras, though, the spotlight quickly dimmed. She felt invisible on set. And Reasoner was hostile toward her.
“The blood was so bad between us, however, that his cronies on the crew took to using a stopwatch to note my airtime,” Walters recalled. “If I did a segment that ran three minutes and twenty-five seconds, Harry would demand that he do a piece three minutes and twenty-five seconds long.”
Viewers noticed the tension. Walters began to receive letters, hundreds of them, from women across the country — many encouraging her to hang in there.
At one point, Walters thought her career might be over. In her memoir, the broadcast journalist from Boston who struggled to pronounce her R’s wrote that everything she had worked for was crashing down.
“I told myself that I should never have taken the chance. Was it ego? Was it too much ambition?”
Ron Simon, a curator at The Paley Center for Media who worked with Walters over the years, recalled great tension in the 1970s. Journalists like Reasoner, he said, were not used to equality with women in the workplace, especially in anchoring the news. The era’s feminist movement was beginning to have a major impact on American consciousness. Adjustments had to be made.
Barbara Walters is seen on NBC’s Today Show on June 3, 1976. (AP Photo/Dave Pickoff)
By then, Walters had already gained the audience’s trust. Before becoming an anchor, she was a writer, researcher and what was once called a “Today Girl” on “The Today Show.”
“People realized that there was an authenticity to her,” Simon said, “and they would go with her probing questions to so many different types of people — whether they be news leaders or celebrities.”
In that era, women were treated as secondary — on-air and off. Walters defied that from the start.
“And that was what Barbara was fighting from the very beginning,” he said. “That’s how remarkable her career was, that she truly engaged with and moved and was just able to succeed in everything that she tried.”
‘20/20’ and ‘Specials’
In July 1978, less than two years after Walters joined him, Reasoner left ABC and returned to CBS.
Just a month earlier, ABC had launched a new weekly newsmagazine, “20/20.” It bombed. “Much too highfalutin,” Walters recalled in her memoir. A New York Times review dubbed the show “dizzyingly absurd.”
Meanwhile, Walters was on the grind, building something more resonant. She scored big in both ratings and popularity through “The Barbara Walters Specials,” a series of in-depth interviews from which rippled even more news. While others tried to define what “serious journalism” looked like, Walters was quietly redrawing the boundaries. Her high-profile interviews didn’t just attract big audiences; they redefined what a TV journalist could be.
“She doesn’t suffer fools,” Sanders Swift said of the preparation Walters would undergo. “She does the research on all of her guests, on everyone she ever interviews.”
Walters sat across from Cuban leader Fidel Castro, holding his gaze as he puffed a cigar. “Your newspapers, radio, television, motion pictures are under state control. No dissent or opposition is allowed in the public media,” she said, calmly but directly. When Castro told her that the island country did not hold the same concept of press freedom, Walters scrunched her eyebrows and asked why. The interview made headlines and, as she later said, helped reestablish her credibility at ABC.
Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, center right, responds to a question from American NBC reporter Barbara Walters, center left, in Havana, May 7, 1975. (AP Photo, File)
She once told Barbra Streisand that she was considered difficult and temperamental. “Are you?” the journalist then asked.
In an interview later viewed by some as patronizing, Walters seemed to target Dolly Parton’s style. She told the country music singer that she didn’t have to look like she did. “You’re very beautiful,” Walters told Parton. “You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs. You don’t have to wear the extreme clothes, right?” Walters also blamed her assistant for another question that alluded to the singer’s full figure. She asked Parton, “Is it all you?”
There was also the famous 1999 interview with Monica Lewinsky, nearly a year after the scandal with President Bill Clinton. Walters called it the biggest “get” of her career. To prepare, she read hundreds of pages of transcripts of the audiotapes that former civil servant Linda Tripp secretly made of conversations with Lewinsky, and the grand jury testimony of the key players in the case. An early list of potential questions to ask Lewinsky ballooned to more than two hundred, until Walters whittled them down to the ones she felt were vital. When she finally sat down with Lewinsky, she dove into the details of the former White House intern’s affair with Clinton. “Where was your self-respect?” Walters asked at one point. “Where was your self-esteem?”
Some of these interviews aired on “20/20,” which was eventually relaunched with Hugh Downs as anchor. Walters said she felt like she wanted “a home,” and “20/20,” with its blend of news and deep conversation, offered it. In 1979, Walters joined Downs on the anchor desk.
“Now, Hugh Downs was not thrilled about getting a co-host,” Page said. “But unlike Harry Reasoner, he accepted her, and they turned out to have a nice chemistry on air.”
Walters would later describe their working relationship as lovely. The two were very different kinds of people, she said, but they had a little humor. Downs was never resentful of her big interviews. And she kept getting them.
President Vladimir Putin, left, shakes hands with U.S. television network ABC journalist Barbara Walters in Moscow’s Kremlin, Monday, Nov. 5, 2001. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel)
Saddam Hussein. Katharine Hepburn. Vladimir Putin. Whitney Houston. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Walters didn’t just interview powerful people — she got them to open up.
She asked bold questions, the kind that were forefront in the minds of her audience. Some don’t stand the test of time. Others became punchlines nearly immediately — questions that critics mocked but viewers remembered.
“What kind of tree would you be?” a question to Hepburn, became a punchline. She famously ended her interview with Lewinsky by asking: “What will you tell your children when you have them?” And she loved to ask: “What is the biggest misconception about you?”
In her memoir, Walters wrote that “20/20” eventually became one of ABC’s most successful weekly programs, and on occasion beat CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
“My permanent place on ‘20/20’ and the continued ‘Specials’ meant more hard work,” the famous anchor wrote. “But at long last I felt I could stop auditioning week to week or, more often, day by day.”
‘The View’
As Walters tells it, “The View” snuck up on her.
The 11 a.m. time period on ABC was in trouble. Out of desperation, Walters recalled, the daytime network executives asked her if she had any ideas.
Turns out, she did have a concept that she thought about from time to time. A show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views.
“So I wondered, if we took a small and varied group of women and made them a permanent cast, would that work for an informative and entertaining hour?” Walters wrote in her memoir. “I thought it might.”
It was an idea that broke just as many rules as Walters had before — a show led by women, shaped by women and centered on women’s voices. In an industry where age and gender still dictated who got to speak, “The View” was a radical act of reimagining the news — not as a lecture, but as a conversation. It proved that smart, sharp women could set the day’s agenda. And it gave Walters her final reinvention — as architect of one of the longest-running talk shows in television history.
The network shrugged, but agreed on a pilot. They rented a hotel suite, brought in cameras, and recorded as women talked to each other like no one was watching.
That, it turned out, was magic.
It took some time to find the right mix of women. But then the cast clicked, the conversations sparked and the network greenlit what became “The View.”
“It’s 1997. She’s 67 years old,” Page said of Walters when the daytime talk show debuted. “This was a time when women were not really allowed to age on the air. Men could get older and (have) gray hair. Women could not.”
“The View” launched on Aug. 11, 1997. Walters and her team deliberately began when the viewing audiences were at their summer low. “This, we felt, would give us the chance to work out the kinks and get used to one another,” she wrote in her memoir. The show’s set was a hand-me-down from an unsuccessful ABC soap opera.
The reviews were favorable, if not unkind to other women’s programming. “The idea of women talking to one another on daytime television is not exactly radical. The idea that those women should be smart and accomplished is still odd enough to make ‘The View’ seem wildly different,” The New York Times wrote. “It actively defies the bubbleheads-‘R’-us approach to women’s talk shows.”
“It really pioneered the kind of talk shows that are now very common on daytime TV, but then weren’t: The idea of this group of women of different ages and different perspectives just having a lively conversation,” Page said. “That was an innovation by this show.”
President Barack Obama appears on the ABC’s television show “The View” in New York, Wednesday, July 28, 2010. He was the first sitting president to appear on a daytime talk show. From left are, Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, the president, Sherri Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Though “The View” was a big part of Walters’ life, she admitted it wasn’t the biggest. The veteran journalist recognized that she was most known for “20/20.”
In the early 2000s, Walters was swamped with both “20/20” and “The View.” There were long workdays, and the relentless pressure to be the first to secure an interview with whoever was making news.
But, with time, Walters saw a shift in the nature of news magazines. The hard news stories became few and far between, except on “60 Minutes,” she recalled, which catered to an older audience. “20/20,” she recalled, was after the young — the 18-to-49-year-olds. That was the age group sought out by advertisers, which Walters said meant that, increasingly, she and other interviewers chased more celebrities. “And it seemed that every celebrity, every murderer, every frog had a lawyer or a press agent all interviewing the interviewer to determine where they could get the most airings for their clients,” Walters wrote in her memoir.
Now it felt to Walters as though the interviewer had to audition to land the interview. The work was no longer fun, and she noted that it certainly wasn’t prestigious.
So on Jan. 26, 2004, Walters announced that, after 25 years on “20/20,” she was leaving the program. Walters said she left voluntarily. In “The Exit Interview” conducted by Virginia Heffernan for The New York Times, Walters said she “wanted to leave at the top.”
Nearly a decade later, in June 2013, the American News Women’s Club honored Walters with its Excellence in Journalism Award — one of many accolades the anchor won throughout her career. Sanders Swift, who was then the organization’s head, recalled the immense support from those who worked with Walters.
Years prior, she had worked as a production associate for Diane Sawyer and occasionally rubbed elbows with Walters. So it was a full-circle moment to present Walters with the award.
“It was one of those pinch-yourself moments, having Barbara Walters in the room,” she recalled. The award was shaped like a big question mark.
Susan Page of USA Today called Barbara Walters a rule breaker from the start.
“It wasn’t that she set out to break the rules,” she said. “She just ignored them. She pretended either they didn’t exist or they couldn’t possibly apply to her, and she just plowed ahead.”
That American News Women’s Club luncheon marked the start of Walters’ farewell tour, recalled Sanders Swift. Walters had not yet revealed her plans to retire, but the headlines were already swirling.
She announced her retirement shortly after, on “The View.” The audience gave her a standing ovation. In the summer of 2014, Walters said, she planned to retire from appearing on television at all. Walters died in 2022. She was 93.
“It has been an absolutely joyful, rewarding, challenging, fascinating and occasionally bumpy ride,” she said. “And I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Michael Trotter Jr., left, and Tanya Trotter of The War and Treaty perform with an image of Barbara Walters during the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
