Barbara Walters, a trailblazing journalist who was the first female anchor on an evening news program, has died, ABC News reports. She was 93.
Over the course of her career, Barbara Walters interviewed everyone from Fidel Castro to Katharine Hepburn, created the pioneering daytime talk show The View, and was honored with 12 Emmy awards for her respected work as a broadcast journalist.
But it was a long journey to get there: When Walters was a reporter at the Today show in the 1970s, she wasn’t even allowed to speak while hosting a joint interview until her male coworker had asked the first three questions.
Walters persisted, eventually becoming the morning program’s first woman cohost, but the sexism she faced at Today wasn’t the last challenge she’d overcome during her career. In 1976 she left Today for ABC to become the first woman coanchor of a network news program. The gig didn’t last long.
“I was a big flop,” she said during her 1999 Glamour speech, where she was honored with a lifetime achievement award. “I was working with a partner who didn’t want to have a woman [on the show]; the audience really didn’t either…. I thought it was the end of my career.” Of course, it wasn’t. She continued interviewing world leaders up until 2016, and The View, which she launched in 1997, continued to draw in more than 3 million viewers a week well into 2020.
The point of her story, Walters explained, is that the challenging moments she overcame—not the career highs or the glamorous moments—are what she looks back on most fondly. “That road back,” she said, “can very often be the most important road with the greatest reward at the end.”
