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While she may be in retirement, Barbra Walters never said that she would never broadcast again.
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After she officially retired from broadcasting last month, legendary television interviewer Barbara Walters has already decided to return to television. ABC News announced on Monday that Walters has been chosen to interview Peter Rodger, the father of Elliot Rodger, the UC Santa Barbara student who killed seven people, including himself, and wounded thirteen in a campus shooting in May.
While no official air date has been set by the American broadcast network, ABC has revealed that the interview will be broadcast on an installment of its long running prime time news program 20/20. Walters is expected to conduct the interview this month somewhere in California.
Apparently Ms. Walters agreed to conduct the interview because Mr. Rodger specifically asked for her.
The 83 year old broadcaster made her retirement official in her last appearance on the American daytime television talk show The View on May 13th. Walters is the co-creator and co-executive producer of the show on which she appeared since it debuted in 1997 and continues to produce.
Barbra Walters began as a writer and segment producer of women’s interest stories on the morning NBC News program The Today Show in the 1960s. Over the years she proved her ability as an on air interviewer and so she was given more and more air time on the show. Walters eventually became the cohost of the program, when, in 1976, she became the first woman to anchor a network news program of any sort in the US.
She is known for having pioneered what became known as “personality journalism” which is characterized by personal interviews in which the viewer is as interested in the interviewer as the he is in the subject. In 1977 she famously interviewed Egypt’s President, Anwar Al Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, at the same time live via satellite from different locations before the two met for the first time.
Her list of famous, or infamous as the case may be, world leaders whom she has interviewed includes: The late last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin; China’s Jiang Zemin; the UK’s Margaret Thatcher; Cuba’s Fidel Castro; India’s Indira Gandhi; Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel; Libya’s late dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi; King Hussein of Jordan; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia; former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
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