Posted on 05/16/2013 8:44:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Of the many milestones in Barbara Walterss career her ascendance from NBC booker to on-camera powerhouse at the Today show, her soft-focus but hard-hitting 20/20 interviews on ABC, her creation of The View perhaps the most notable is that shes retiring of her own volition next year. But the funny thing is that, if she were interested in extending her career by a few years or decades, her sensibility would translate perfectly online.
Only Diane Sawyer, sixteen years her junior, has had comparable staying power. Most of the prominent broadcast-news women of recent decades Katie Couric, Elizabeth Vargas, Meredith Vieira, and most recently Ann Curry end up shunted to correspondent roles after halfhearted announcements about their desire to spend more time with family. Its been inspiring to watch Walters age on-camera, not only because we're not used to seeing old women on television, but also because shes served as a bridge between an era when news was defined by a small, homogenous group of experts to a time when discussion and conversation reign. This shift, derided by serious journalists as a watering-down of the news, is the real difference between the pre-digital and digital eras. Overall, its coincided with an expansion of the definition of news and the sort of person who is qualified to report and comment on it.
It hasnt been the smoothest transition. Women, despite occupying the anchors chair in decently representative numbers, are forced, before our very eyes, to reconcile the binding double standard that women face in almost every professional area. They must be soft but not too soft, confident but not conceited, bold but not threatening. They are literally performing femininity. And the consequences for a misstep are great. See, most recently, the Today shows expulsion of Ann Curry.
Walters, however, has successfully walked this tightrope for decades. In the earliest days of her career, she both suffered and benefited from being one of the only women in serious TV news. In interviews, she could be a journalistic wolf in sheeps clothing, easing into difficult questions. (In 2008, she greeted Obama on The View by talking about how sexy he was, then immediately asked him about Jeremiah Wright.) As women have become more normalized as news authorities, their ability to use gender stereotypes to their advantage has faded somewhat. Its what makes Walters both a great example but also one that's tough to follow.
When she announced her retirement this week, the press was positive, lauding her ability to bridge the gap between news and entertainment the ultimate media switch-hitter. It used to be that sliding subtly from celebrity gossip to a White House press conference was infotainment, fodder for mockery, a way of discrediting women journalists, who, especially in the early decades of Walterss career, had no point of entry on the hard-news side of the business. Their path to the top was to accept the fluff assignments, the dog shows and beauty interviews, and then transition to interviewing prime ministers and covering tragedies. Walters pioneered this strategy.
Walterss method can create jarring transitions, wrote Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker in 2008, the year Walterss memoir was published. In 1977, she rushed from Dolly Parton to Anwar Sadat, and in 2006 had to skip an interview with Hugo Chávez because she was with the widow of a man eaten by a crocodile and it consistently generates tut-tutting from colleagues, especially male ones. Is Barbara a journalist, or is she Cher? Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, asked when she was made an anchor. (Answer: shes a journalist who finds Cher a delight to talk to.) Thats evident in Walterss 1985 interview with the pop icon.
Her approach opened the door for other women to move into the anchors seat. In 2006, when Katie Couric became the first woman to anchor CBS News without a male co-host, the Washington Post warned that men are disappearing from TV newsrooms and the gender shift had led to a shift in the subject matter deemed worthy of national news broadcasts.By the late 1990s, the Post reported, subjects that had all but been ignored years earlier abortion, child care, sexual discrimination in the workplace were part of the serious news agenda. These days, Diane Sawyer is the only woman hosting a nightly news broadcast, but network news has also faded in prominence as more viewers get their news from the morning news shows and online venues where the topics formerly derided as womens issues get far more airtime and discussion.
Nowhere is this sensibility more evident than on Walterss brainchild, The View, a panel-style show in which women of different political backgrounds discuss everything from war to plastic surgery. Sure, it may produce some stupid clips of the women fawning over attractive male actors, but they also ask serious questions of legit politicians. And the conversational format feels more at home in the digital age a time when everything is up for debate online than two anchors staring straight ahead and delivering scripted news and commentary.
It is no surprise that these advances came from Walters, who has admirably never shied away from her interest in even the most lowbrow public figures. Women are the internet, and the internet is women, declared n+1 last year. Digital media prioritize the conversation around a piece of journalism as much as the journalism itself. They give us health tips next to dispatches from Syria next to celebrity news next to investigative reporting. The most read list and Twitter feed erase distinctions between sections of the newspaper and segments of the broadcast news show. Everything is media. And the ability to fluidly move from highbrow to low, and from serious to snarky, is a skill the Internet rewards.
I happen to move in the same circles in which the powerful people move, Walters said in 1974, when she was the highest-paid woman in TV news. Her strength was in having a broad definition of power, and that point of view will also be her legacy. Even decades ago, when her career was ascendant, she was prepared to make way for a new generation. We all know that everything e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g comes to an end, she added.
I thought Al did it. Give or take a few dozen pounds.
Women are the internet, and the internet is women, declared n+1 last year.
Mostly naked ones, I think.
I loved her on saturday night live.
She will retire like babs streisand! She won’t go away.
Oh, she slept with Al Gore?
BaBa WaWa spoke at an event at my high school. It being an all-girls school that encouraged outspokenness, I asked her a provocative question about her reportedly competitive relationship with Diane Sawyer.
Babs seemed visibly irritated and then proceeded to answer a question I did not ask, something about women in the media.
It was an instructive exchange that has forever tainted my view of her and of the media in general.
should be “to learn”.
With Al from Tenn. I was speaking in local dialect I guess.
>> her ascendance from NBC booker
Not joking when my bad vision first saw ‘hooker’.
bump
very true
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