“Tell me everything,” Barbara Walters used to urge her TV guests. She believed she could coax the truth out of anyone, whether revered or disgraced, and so did her viewers.
Her confidence would be challenged today when every fragment of news, even neighborhood trivia, disappears in a blur of distrust. Since viewers no longer believe what they hear, she’d wonder, might her interviewees become too constrained about what they say?
President Trump distrusts the news media so intensely he limits his announcements to his website, even when they’re nakedly bogus (“lasting disarmament”?) .
If that revered truth-teller Walter Cronkite were alive today it’s doubtful whether even he could cast a clear focus on Gaza or Tehran, on Zelenskyy or Netanyahu. Frustrated, he might even unleash AI on ICE just to see what emerges.
Media reporting on immigration purges is so distrusted that entire new layers of fact-finders have been mobilized to check things out. Thus a reporter’s account of an ICE intervention must be validated by reps from protest groups, women’s marches, LGBTQ supporters, etc., lest the stories be somehow suspect.
“It’s like the atmosphere of occupied France in World War II when anti-Nazi secrets were conveyed person-to-person, but never in print,” notes one historian.
The new media underground would come as a culture shock to the generation of Cronkites and Edward R. Murrows and their female counterparts – Walters, Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer, Oprah Winfrey. According to the mandate of that time, “hard news” belonged to men while women covered the domain of entertainment and celebrities.
Tell Me Everything, a new documentary from Hulu, vividly captures the trials and triumphs of Walters in overcoming that dictate. The doc was directed by Jackie Jesko for Imagine, the Brian Grazer-Ron Howard company. Walters died at 93 in 2022, having scored a remarkable range of “gets” from Anwar Sadat to Fidel Castro to Monica Lewinsky (that alone pulled in 70 million viewers).
Walters achieved her own form of immortality by asking Barbra Streisand why she’d rejected a nose job or challenging Castro to shave his beard. “She fiercely pursued her homework in searching for that key vulnerability,” observed Bob Iger.
Walters confided her own vulnerabilities as well. Married four times, she admitted to being “a failure” as a wife. One ex, Merv Adelson, the Lorimar chief, observed that, to Walters, “husbands seemed to be counted like a TV ‘get’ and marriage was akin to a chain of interviews.” Adelson also was troubled that Walters liked hanging out with the notorious Roy Cohn because the lawyer “shared good gossip.” She’d also had a secretive affair with the then-married U.S. senator Edward Brooke.
Perversely, network chiefs consistently tried to pair Walters with anchors who were openly sexist in their opinions, such as Harry Reasoner or Peter Jennings. Walters’ co-host on the Today show, Frank McGee, demanded he be guaranteed the first three questions of every guest interview before Walters could intrude.
Walters herself came from a showbiz background. Her father ran night clubs like the Latin Quarter catering to the Sinatra set. She’d learned the “scoop” on celebrities from childhood who were too broke to pay their bills or too drunk to remember the names of their dates.
While jumping from one show to the next, Walters nurtured her relationship with fans and would have been appalled by the current aura of distrust. When Walters broke a story, she would have been upset to learn that her scoop had to pass muster with special interest groups in order to earn validation.
Having known and interviewed Donald Trump, she understood why his disclosures were subject to challenge. The fact that his loss of personal credibility has now undermined the credibility of media as a whole, she’d feel, represented a danger to the tenets of free speech.
