Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Barbara Walters

American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters (1929-) has a reputation for always getting the inside scoop through her compassionate ability to ask anyone anything. She was so good at it that she even wrote the book on it, the 1970 publication How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything. Walters became the first woman to officially co-anchor a network news program when she stepped into the role in 1976 on ABC Evening News. She had already served as a writer, segment producer, and segment host on the Today Show for over a decade. At ABC, she was a trailblazer for a new kind of news coverage dubbed “personality journalism,” which walked the line between hard news and human interest. This was a different approach from Marlene Sanders’s interest in serious journalism, which was also breaking news barriers at the same time. Walters’s strength was her soft approach, and her specialty was on-air exclusive interviews, meeting with royalty, spiritual leaders, controversial heads of state, high-profile convicts, and the ten most fascinating people of the year. Struggling through many years of gender discrimination with cohosts and producers, Walters went on to co-anchor 20/20 for fifteen years before creating and starring on her own show, The View, for nearly another decade. Her forty-year-long career, which is still going strong, invented a whole new category of careers for women and reshaped the form of television news itself. And that is no small legacy.