Let's Have a Real Conversation About Barbara Walters

Seventeen leading broadcasters on her legacy and making their way in the world she made.

- By Irin Carmon. Portfolio by Brigitte Lacombe

Barbara Walters died on December 30 at the age of 93 during a low ebb in the news cycle. Her home of 50 years, ABC News, pressed play on a two-hour prime-time special, Our Barbara, but it aired during the attentional wasteland of New Year’s Day. Walters, whose ambition had no off switch, would have been irritated about the timing.

In Audition, her memoir, Walters lists every important person who came to her retirement party, then self-consciously wonders, “Do I sound like an awful jerk? Should this have meant so much? I’m not sure, but it did.” When ABC News renamed its building for Walters two years later, she fretted that the plaque was too small. “Tell me where it is,” she demanded of Ramin Setoodeh in his book about The View. “You don’t even know.”

But if tweets and Instagram posts and statements crafted by the publicists of famous newswomen had meant anything to her, Walters would have been cheered. They used words like trailblazer and legend; they thanked her for inspiring and for mentoring. The undisguised sexism she experienced in her half-century on-air career was discussed vaguely at a safe historical remove. And yet, zombielike, it intruded. Weeks after Walters died, Don Lemon, 57 and appointed to save CNN’s morning show, apologized for telling America, and his female co-hosts (ages 30 and 40), that “a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s, 30s, and maybe her 40s.” By then, what had been a gleefully viral story of