How Barbara Walters Fought for—and Against—TV’s Other Top Female News Anchors

Barbara Walters got comfortable being the only woman in a room. Before pioneering the nightly newsmagazine—where she’d interview movie stars and murderers with the same level of voracity—she began her career as the first female cohost of Today. Before officially nabbing the title, she often appeared on the program alongside Frank McGee. As she says in the new documentary Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything, now streaming on Hulu, he promptly instituted a rule that Walters could not ask a question until after he had asked three.

When ABC hired Walters as the network’s first female (and, eventually, its highest-paid) nightly news coanchor, opposite Harry Reasoner, “I would walk into that studio, and Harry would be sitting with the stagehands, and they’d all crack jokes and ignore me. No one would talk to me,” Walters says in footage used for the doc. “There was not a woman on the staff.” This was, she adds, “the most painful period in my life.”

Inter-studio tensions with her male counterparts sent Walters out into the field, where she made a name for herself getting scoops that no one else could—on everyone from Fidel Castro to Monica Lewinsky. “The world of television journalism was a man’s world,” Walters said in a 2014 interview with OWN also excerpted in the film. “It’s the way it was thought of then—the so-called ‘hard news.’ A woman couldn’t do it, the audience wouldn’t accept her voice, she couldn’t go into the war zones, she couldn’t ask the tough questions.”

Perhaps it was Walters’ tireless battle for credibility that made her resistant to her own eventual competition. The new documentary delves into her rivalry with network colleague Diane Sawyer, which resulted in a “cold war” between the women that fellow anchor Connie Chung now says she regrets getting in the middle of. Elsewhere in the doc, Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric talk about how Walters shaped their beliefs about raising children while working in news. Couric ultimately opted to prioritize her family over work; Winfrey decided to never have children.

But in the years before her death in 2022 at age 93, Walters seemed to better understand her role in elevating other women in a male-dominated industry. In 1997, she created The View, an all-female panel show on the same network where she’d broken ground decades earlier. “She’s mentioned in the same sentence as feminist icons, but she wasn’t a crusader. She wasn’t Gloria Steinem,” the documentary’s director, Jackie Jesko, told Variety. “She wasn’t doing it for other women. She was doing it for herself. We shouldn’t require that of our feminist icons.

“She made it possible for other women, and she loved that once she realized it. But it wasn’t what drove her. She was upfront about it: ‘I didn’t do it for other women, but I’m so glad that I did it and other women benefited.’”

Ahead, a snapshot of Walters’ relationship with some of TV’s top female anchors—and what they had to say about her legacy in the new documentary.

Diane Sawyer

“If someone had built to order the woman most likely to set off Barbara Walters, she would have looked a lot like Diane Sawyer,” Susan Page wrote in her 2024 book The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. “If Diane was cool and aloof, Barbara was hot, intense, in your face. Diane glided. Barbara charged.”

In the documentary, former 20/20 executive producer Victor Neufeld confirms that Walters was unhappy when Sawyer arrived on the scene, given their similar purviews. “Barbara watched Diane warily, because she was really in the same altitude as Barbara,” 20/20 producer Martin Clancy says in the film. “Other correspondents were not a threat. I think Barbara secretly resented Diane for being younger.”

Also a sore spot for Walters? Sawyer’s looks. “She was certainly dogged by Diane’s very existence. She often said Diane was the perfect woman,” says NBC’s Cynthia McFadden in the film. “She used the word ‘a blonde goddess.’ This was an ideal woman, and Barbara couldn’t compete with that. She could work harder. She could know more people. But she couldn’t compete with that.”

Sawyer, who does not appear in the documentary, has admitted to some discord between her and Walters. “When I arrived, I’m sure it was confusing to her because interviews had been her sole terrain,” Sawyer told Page for her book. “I was always working on some long-form, delving into violence in schools or something that had really intrigued me. So I never felt that shows I was on, or my career, depended on interviews solely, but I understood what they meant to her. When I started doing some interviews, I think it must have thrown her.”

The doc delves into one particularly tense showdown, when Walters and Sawyer competed to interview Katharine Hepburn. Sawyer got the story, despite Walters’ attempts to sway the Oscar winner to her side. “If I showed up on Mars, they would have a note there with the Barbara Walters stationary that is just requesting an interview with anybody who might happen to show,” Sawyer jokes in footage shown in the documentary.

“I know that nobody, maybe, will believe this,” Sawyer told Page for her book, “but we spent a lot of time laughing and forging a real friendship, and that was true even when I first arrived.. I could share anything with her, and I know she shared things with me, things that were very close to the bone.”

Walters also denied ever having a full-on feud with Sawyer, saying via voiceover in the doc: “I don’t think Diane Sawyer and I had a feud. I think people know that we were after the same [interview] gets.” And when she died in 2022, Sawyer paid tribute to her sometime rival in a statement: “Barbara was a trailblazer, a singular force who opened the door for every woman in television news.”

Connie Chung

Joining ABC News in 1997 after stints at NBC and CBS was a fatal mistake for Chung. “Diane and Barbara were in this monstrous bout to win stories,” she says in the documentary, “and I was caught in the middle.”

Chung recently said that early in her career, Walters mentored her. “But as soon as I was planted in the same network, it was really scary because she had power—and she wanted to hold onto her power. But I was okay with that.”

Chung watched firsthand as Walters and Sawyer duked it out for big interviews. “Unfortunately, we as women were given such a tiny sliver of the pie that I found that the women were fighting each other for that tiny sliver,” Chung said at a recent event, according to People. “Because the men had the whole other piece of the pie, and they could swim in a greater body of work. But we had this tiny little sliver. So Barbara and Diane were battling each other as if they had to.”

This isn’t the first time Chung has spoken about this fraught dynamic. On an episode of Los Angeles Magazine’s The Originals podcast back in 2020, Chung said: “I was always playing a game of Whack-a-Mole. I popped my head up and one of them would have a hammer and go whack, and put me down back in my little hole.” When asked how it felt to get “knee-capped” professionally, Chung replied, “It’s not unlike what Tonya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan.” In response to Chung’s comments at the time, Walters’ rep told TMZ: “Barbara paved the way for every female journalist that came after her. She has been a tremendous supporter for all women.”

Despite their sometimes frosty interactions, after Walters’ death in 2022, Chung had nothing but kind words. “Barbara fought the all-boys world of television journalism with her indefatigable drive, brains and confidence—to tower above the men,” Chung said in a statement to NBC News. “She paved my path as she ‘Mom’d’ me, consoling me when I hit roadblocks. No one will replace Barbara.”

Katie Couric

Couric, who became the first solo female anchor of a major network evening news program when she moved to CBS, also had heartfelt words for Walters upon her passing. Calling her “the OG of female broadcasters” on Instagram, Couric wrote, “She was just as comfortable interviewing world leaders as she was Oscar winners and her body of work is unparalleled. I was a lucky recipient of her kindness and encouragement,” adding. “When I landed a big (impromptu) interview with President Bush, she wrote me a note that I still have framed in my office: Dear Katie, You were terrific with Mrs. Bush (you knew far more than she did) and nabbing the President was a real coup. You are so darn good! Bravo!”

But in the documentary, Couric says she took other lessons from Walters—namely, about not neglecting her personal life to prioritize her career. She also recalls an offhanded remark that Walters once made about the two of them: “Oh, we’re so alike. Neither of us is that attractive.”

Oprah Winfrey

“She was a mentor for me before she knew that she was a mentor,” Winfrey says in the film, sharing her experience of watching Walters on TV as a kid. “She was looking for a vulnerability that you had not offered to the world.” That influenced Winfrey’s decision to talk openly about being sexually abused during her 1988 sitdown with Walters. “She asked the question that nobody else had asked. And asked it in a way that always hit a nerve.”

That was also true in 1998, when Walters secured the highest-rated news interview of all time: a sitdown with Monica Lewinsky following her affair with then-President Bill Clinton. “We had an agreement with Monica Lewinsky’s team,” Winfrey says in the doc, “and then Barbara swooped in and said to Monica Lewinsky, ‘I can give you a better deal.’” Walters had offered Lewinsky appearances on ABC’s Nightline and Good Morning America, which Winfrey couldn’t compete with. “I didn’t like that,” Winfrey says.

In the film, Winfrey also gets candid about Walters’ “charged, complex relationship” with her daughter, Jacqueline, whom she adopted with ex-husband Lee Guber in 1968. While Walters once told Dolly Parton during an interview that becoming a mother was “the best thing I ever did,” she also admitted that she struggled to spend time with Jacqueline at the height of her career.

“It’s one of the reasons why I never had children,” Winfrey says in the documentary. “I remember her telling me once that ‘there’s nothing more fulfilling than having children, and you should really think about it.’ And I was like, ‘OK, but I’m looking at you. So, no.’”

In the film, Winfrey says that she understands why Walters prioritized her professional life. “You are a pioneer in your field and you are trying to break the mold, for yourself and for women who are going to follow you,” Winfrey says. “Something’s going to have to give for that. And that is why I did not have children. I knew I could not do both well. Both are sacrifices. Sacrifice to do the work, and it’s also sacrifice to be the mother and to say, ‘No, let somebody else have that.’”

As Winfrey explains, “At no time have I ever heard a story, read a story, and based on what I know of Barbara Walters—at no time has Barbara Walters ever said, ‘No, let someone else take that story.’”

Cynthia McFadden

The former NBC correspondent, who was an ABC News anchor during Walters’ tenure, had unique insight into Walters’s role as mother. McFadden, herself an adoptee, was personally asked to interview Jacqueline for Walters’ 2001 special on adoption, Born in My Heart: A Love Story. “Jackie was about as different from her mom as it was possible to be,” McFadden says. In a clip from that interview, Jacqueline tells McFadden that “being the child of a famous woman” was harder than having been adopted.

“It’s important to say, Jackie had a father and Jackie had a governess, so it wasn’t that Jackie was left alone on a playpen” while Walters pursued her career, McFadden says in the doc. Still, “Barbara articulated many times that she’d made mistakes as a mother.”

Walters’ dynamic with her daughter improved over the years, but some adolescent wounds never fully healed. “As she got older, I think Barbara felt that the relationship was shaky,” says McFadden in the film. “She didn’t tell me enough of the facts to make me understand why she felt that way, but it seemed to me that she felt that she and Jackie had fallen out again.”

The Women of The View

Despite her competitive nature with a few female anchors, in 1997, Walters created space for dozens of them on TV with The View, where she ran the hot topics roundtable alongside cohosts ranging from Joy Behar and Rosie O’Donnell to Star Jones and Elizabeth Hasselback. On her final show in 2014, Winfrey introduced a surprise lineup of female journalists whose careers Walters had inspired, including Sawyer, Couric, McFadden, and Today mainstays Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb, to name a few. Looking across the stage at her bevy of prodigees, Walters said, “I just want to say—this is my legacy.”