Letters to the Editor
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Just curious
"I was the same person who chose the so-called lesser sorority in high school rather than take a chance on not being chosen at all."
What kind of high school has a sorority? Aren't high schols cliquey enough?
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A gas bag and a gossip hag
Traister and Walsh's model journalist. Gilda Radner did a golden comedy impression of Walters.
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Wuvved it
Barbara Walters: "In this book I basically bleed for 570 pages."
Maybe she should have done an interview with a vampire!
Yuk, yuk.
(Yuck.)
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Not sure what's gonna be said but
Walters adds nothing of interest to The View, if that isn't weird in its own right. I'm a 30-something year old guy that works in a place with TV for our clients. Every time she has something to say, it is either of no consequential opinion(she's friends with everyone but not what I want from an experienced TV talent, esp. with the rest of that crew) or just cringe inducing(Obama being sexy). The program isn't aimed at me but I like to imagine the women it is aimed at have higher standards. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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Tom
Let me tell ya, you're right on target.
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Barbara
My Mother, even when she was beginning to suffer from advance stages of senility, was sharp enough to say if I had The View on, "I can't stand that women's voice! Turn her off!!!"...responding to another commenter:
The program isn't aimed at me but I like to imagine the women it is aimed at have higher standards. Correct me if I'm wrong.
-- TomG76
No, it isn't aimed at you...so don't be too concerned about its standards...
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Confess
I confess to rarely and not near recently seeing The View.
Back when, i found some of the agressively vulgar ladies too unpalatable.
The lady herself was brilliant. The cloy was icky, yes, but certainly elicited results far beyond the anticipated degree of revelation in countless imparters.
Harry Reasoner, not quite first string himself, lacked in chemistry.
Hugh Downs, true gentleman, Jack Paar veteran, was a perfect match.
I don't know why she talked like that. Nobody else did, except Crazy Guggenheim.
And, again, though i've scant knowledge of her View years,it's remarkable how such a harmless,
purely feminine one evolved in culturalizing the new niche of televised intimacy, and having it to herself such a long time.
That Oprah Winfrey best took hold of the path Walters cleared is an obvious tribute to Barbara.
I knew some who knew her pre-fame.
For all the parody and enunciation noted, she was never mean, rude, vain nor dishonest.
Career-wise, okay, you could say Katie Couric. But more accurately, in temperature, at least, let's remember Jane Pauley; or even (though he was before her,) Paar.
Not your little finger raised cup of tea? Okay. But she ever proved that civil, cordial, polite and warm can be good hosts to welcome and increase the verity in personal discourse.
Unique!
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Pathetic
Iconic? Well, that certainly illustrates what's wrong with journalism today. We make icons of pandering, sensationalistic celebrity ass-kissers who couldn't write a news story if their jobs depended on it. Which they don't.
Television journalism has been an oxymoron for so long that it no longer qualifies as something to be outraged about.
Baba Wawa has the ultimate distinction of having led the way down the slippery slope from news to infotainment. She and Oprah are equals, but please don't confuse that with journalism.
Why can't the networks put forth competent female journalists instead of giving us glorified gossip columnists like Barbara and Katie Couric? It's not like they don't exist. Give us Leslie Stahl, Linda Ellerbee, Rehema Ellis.
Are the networks trying to commit journalistic suicide? It's hard to believe anything else given the idiotic decisions they make. But, then, it's corporate beancounters that make the decisions and that's reflected in what goes out on the airwaves.
Personally, I haven't had a TV for years. That's something of a statement for one who made his living at TV journalism back in the 1970s. I'm glad to be doing solid journalism for a local weekly and keep hoping that the old-fashioned journalistic values will make a comeback.
Yup, I'm hopelessly out of date. But I'm younger than Barbara Walters and would be happy if her brand of false journalism rides off into the sunset with her. Unfortunately, her influence is so pervasive that I have little hope that real journalism will return.
I do what I can on a local level and try not to think about the damage that Walters and her ilk have done to a once honorable profession.
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Popcorn reading for the summer
This sounds like a good guilty pleasure. the kind of book you sheepishly check out of the library (but not purchase) and read at the beach, holding it so no one sees what it's about. I've always been ambivalent about Walters. She faces hurdles, but was hardly the first woman to enter the "big time" (think Nancy Dickerson)She wasn't the first lightweight to enter journalism (think former actor Mike Wallace), but the came to epitomize weightless tv journalism and the descent from seriousness. She's a melodramatic, hardly incisive interviewer and was probably in her most appropriate mileu on Today. Her career makes it easy to forget that there were other, more courageous female journalists in the era before she made the anchor desk. She deserves props for inventing herself, as well as brickbats for the same. The book sounds like depth in the same way as her tv persona, all mildly guilty entertainment and vouyeurism rather than anything really serious.
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Fortuitious means Accidental, not Fortunate
i usually leave illiterate writers to their own untold shame, but when the sentence is its opposite, "It is surely fortuitous, if not planned", i have to remark. you are a role model - get an editor, go back to high school, buy a dictionary, google unfamiliar words. The word comes from fortune, as in its vagaries, it doesn't mean "lucky" but thanks to philistines like you, it probably will soon will. language is like that - lowest common denominator - and i do mean common, traister.
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Tough to watch any TV "Journalists"
A few nights ago, at a social gathering, Wolf Blitzer's name came up and boy did the mocking begin. No one was spared. It seems all TV journalists are held in disdain, across the board, at least as evidenced by this representative group of 40 something professionals.
Diane Sawyer was the object of particular scorn for the oh-os-nonchalant come hither coyness that she wears on her sleeve.
Larry King needs to retire was the consensus. He looks like a deer caught on the headlights most days.
It seems that while many of us sit and watch--and it seems we at least do that-- the mealy mouthed TV talking news heads we find ourselves loathing their every utterance.
They've all become what we as Americans in 2008 wanted them to become, or perhaps, more accurately willed them to become: Vapid, self important blowhards.
Perhaps we see too much of ourselves in our mainstream, prime-time airbrushed TV journalists.
Reporters aren't the new anyway. Note to Barbara: Shut Up. Since when is "asking the tough questions" rocket science" anyway.