She was the first woman to present an evening newscast in the United States. American journalist Barbara Walters has died at the age of 93, her longtime employer, ABC, announced on Friday December 20. The American chain did not give the cause or the place of his death.
This legend of the American audiovisual landscape had said goodbye in 2014, at the age of 84, with a ” Goodbye “ in French which had concluded more than fifty years of television. Until then, Barbara Walters had interviewed all the presidents of the United States from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, foreign leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Anouar El-Sadat and Fidel Castro, the Dalai Lama and other celebrities like Bette Davis and Angelina Jolie.
She became a celebrity herself in the American information world, in particular on the daily program “The View”, which she had created in 1997 on ABC. The journalist had won twelve Emmy Awards, all but one while she was with ABC, the channel added.
First woman to present the evening newspaper
When she left in 2014, she said she was happy to have been a pioneer in a profession long reserved for men. Hillary Clinton had come to pay her respects as well as television host and producer Oprah Winfrey and about twenty women television journalists.
In 1976, she was the first woman to present the evening newscast “ABC Evening News”, earning a then unprecedented salary of $1 million a year. Two years earlier, she had co-hosted a morning program on NBC. But it had been a “flops”recalled Barbara Walters forty years later: “My male co-host didn’t want a partner [féminine] and neither does the public. »
She then imposed herself thanks to her interviews in a unique style, from Vladimir Poutine to Michael Jackson via Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. Her greatest pride was to have contributed to the arrival of women journalists on television. “If I did anything to help with this, it’s my legacy”she said again in 2014.