Barbara Walters: Changing The Face Of Television News

By | September 8, 2021

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American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters looks at film negatives with an unidentified man behind the scenes at NBC Studios, New York, New York, 1966. (Photo by Rowland Scherman/Getty Images)

Although she inspired Gilda Radner’s caricature on Saturday Night Live, “Baba Wawa,” and her interview with Katharine Hepburn has been lampooned because Walters asked the question “if you were a tree, what kind would you be?” (much later, it was revealed that this was a follow-up question to Hepburn’s statement that she would like to be a tree), Walters had a tremendous impact on the news.

Born on September 25, 1929 in Boston, Walters was around celebrities at a very young age. Her father Louis managed the Latin Quarter nightclub in Boston, and later opened the New York version of the club. He was also a Broadway producer, producing the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943. Louis took Walters to dress rehearsals, where the actresses and dancers would fawn over her. Because of this early exposure, Walters was not in awe of celebrities. 

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In her early days on television. Source: (Pinterest).

Breaking Into Television Journalism

Walters attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she majored in English. After she graduated, she began working at the NBC Affiliate in New York City, WNBT-TV, now WNBC. At first, she was writing press releases and doing publicity. In 1953, she began producing a 15-minute children’s program, Ask the Camera. She left the network when her boss pressured her to marry him. After leaving her job, she went on to produce the Eloise McElhone Show for WPIX, but the show was cancelled by 1954. In 1955, she became a writer at CBS’s The Morning Show. She worked for a few years as a publicist with Tex McCrary Inc. and as a writer for Redbook magazine, joining NBC’s The Today Show as a writer and researcher in 1961.