Birthday: September 25, 1929 (Libra)
Born In: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Barbara Walters
(Pioneering U.S. Television Journalist)
Barbara Jill Walters was a television personality and broadcast journalist who first became famous as the segment producer of women’s interest stories on the NBC News program ‘The Today Show’. Highly acclaimed for her exceptional interviewing ability and journalistic standards, she was the first woman ever to acquire the title ‘co-host’ for any news program. She was very popular with the viewers because of which she was allotted more air time by the channel. An ambitious woman who became a role model for other female journalists to follow, she became the first female co-anchor of any network evening news when she worked with Harry Reasoner on the ‘ABC Evening News’. Thereafter she hosted several morning television shows like ‘Today’ and ‘The View’. For twenty-five years she worked as the co-host and producer of the news magazine ‘20/20’ (from 1979 to 2004). She was noted for her candid, no nonsense style of speaking and was known to never mince words even when speaking about sensitive issues. Her field of specialty was personality journalism and she had the distinction of interviewing several world leaders, including the Shah of Iran, Russia’s Boris Yeltsin, China’s Jiang Zemin, Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi and India’s Indira Gandhi.
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