MEDIA POLITICS - Barbara Walters has announced her retirement from journalism, a profession she claims to have been practicing for more than 50 years.
Walters, the former co-host of the “Today” show, ABC World News, “20/20,” and current co-host of “The View,” is a national icon and a pioneer, and probably as responsible as any other living person for the ridiculous and sorry state of American television journalism.
She has announced her retirement a year in advance, so that a series of aggrandizing specials can be produced celebrating her long and storied career.
So let’s get things started off right, by reminding everyone how her entire public life has been an extended exercise in sycophancy and unalloyed power worship.
When she’s not interviewing famous people, Walters is partying and vacationing with and occasionally dating them. Former relationships (dutifully recounted in her boldfaced-name-heavy memoir) include Sen. Edward Brooke, former Bear Stearns head Alan Greenberg, and Alan Greenspan, who I guess has a type.
She’s buddies with war criminal and society fixture Henry Kissinger. She’s old friends with make-believe TV tycoon Donald Trump. She testified at the Brooke Astor trial, because Astor was, of course, a close friend.
I’m not insinuating that Walters’ myriad personal relationships with every single powerful person she’s ever met have affected her work. I am allowing her to make that case for me.
While the rumor that Walters had a romantic affair with George Steinbrenner, the married owner of the New York Yankees, is just a rumor, what is known is that they were close friends, and that that friendship led Walters to cover for him when she inadvertently stumbled into what would have been a good story.
Steinbrenner first met Walters in Cuba in 1977. She was there to interview Cuban premier Fidel Castro, and he was there with Yankee pitching great Whitey Ford on a top-secret mission to scout Cuban baseball players.
As Walters related numerous times, Steinbrenner was furious when he spotted her and her camera crew in the hotel where they were staying, mistakenly thinking she was there to report on him.
Over cocktails later that day, she explained that she was actually in Cuba to interview Castro, and that Steinbrenner’s secret was safe with her.
Steinbrenner and Walters were often seen together around and about in New York, and Steinbrenner was fond of telling intimates how he and Walters would be walking down Fifth Avenue together and would make bets as to which one of them would be recognized first. And throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Walters was a frequent guest in Steinbrenner’s private box at Yankee Stadium and in the Yankee Club. (Read more … including how she pretended to be having an affair with a mob attorney … here)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 39
Pub: May 14, 2013
