Barbara Walters and Desirable Disadvantages
Reporter Leaned on Family, Timing and Grit to Overcome Desirable Disadvantages.
By Laura Osterlund | Journalism Major at Bethel University
Barbara Walters sits down in a yellow armchair across from Monica Lewinsky. She tucks one foot under the other, holding a set of note cards as she folds her hands on top of her black skirt.
The date is March 3, 1999, and the nation still reels from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that occurred two years prior, and Monica Lewinsky has quickly become the nation’s most talked-about intern. After a several-year-long media storm, Walters’ interview has been the first that Lewinsky has agreed to be a part of, breaking her silence.
Walters starts her interview with personal, thought-provoking questions, and manages to grow in levels of intensity.
Her first question: “You have been described as a bimbo, a stalker, a seductress. Describe yourself” exemplifies the interview style that has become her signature (Lewinsky). Not too hard, but not too soft.
Her questions get deeper and deeper until she gets to a point where she can ask a question so profound that multiple bombs will drop at once from the answer. Finally, she asks:
“What will you tell your children, when you have them?”
“Mommy made a big mistake.”
“And that, is the understatement of the year” (Lewinsky).
This interview reaches a record 74 million views, making it the most watched television news interview of all time. It is one of the many interviews that Barbara Walters conducted in her 50-year-long career.
Barbara Walters credits her family background and lucky breaks that placed her at the right place at the right time as well as the desirable disadvantages that she faced as a woman in a field dominated by men to be the main factors that contributed to her career success.
Walters’ success cannot just be measured by her merits alone. She received several advantages and opportunities that allowed for her to thrive. One advantage that she had was that she benefited from her family’s background. Author Malcolm Gladwell explained how a person’s family background can contribute to their success in his book Outliers when he said, “what your parents do for a living, and the assumptions that accompany the class your parents belong to, matter” (131). Gladwell used several examples to support this claim, including how his own family’s background played a role in his life.
The social class and occupation of Walters’ parents definitely made a measurable impact on her life and career. Her parents raised her in a ‘showbiz’ environment. Her father owned a popular nightclub called “The Latin Quarter” that many celebrities went to. Because of the exposure that Walters had to celebrities that she received from this, she grew comfortable in their presence. She learned that celebrities were “human and could bleed” (“Barbara Walters: Her Story”). She also learned to ask questions about the childhoods of her interviewees, when to just listen, and what kinds of questions could invoke tears in even the most stone-cold of people (Walters, 38).
“Her background gave her a knack for finding deep, personal questions to ask interviewees, and she had no fear asking them.”
These lessons she learned, combined with the level of comfort that she gained from her experiences with “The Latin Quarter” ultimately helped her to become more confident when she started interviewing celebrities. And thus, she developed a signature style of conducting interviews: personality journalism. Her background gave her a knack for finding deep, personal questions to ask interviewees, and she had no fear asking them.
Her bold questions have had the reputation of making celebrities cry, including another influential woman in the television industry, Oprah Winfrey.
Walters asks Winfrey a wide range of questions in an interview and gets to a point where she asks about her good friend Gayle King. She acknowledges rumors about the state of the relationship between the two women, and Winfrey explains how much their friendship means to her. She raises her right hand up and says “I don’t know a better person,” as tears start to form in her eyes (Winfrey).
“It’s making me cry because I’m thinking about… I probably have never told her that. Tissue, please. I now need tissue. I’ve never told her that. I just realized that she is the friend that she is the friend that everybody should have” Winfrey says, wiping her eyes with a tissue (Winfrey).
Many of Walters’ interviews look similar to this, all due to the fact that she always knew the right questions to ask, which she learned from her upbringing.
Family background wasn’t the only factor that contributed to Walters’ success. Throughout her life, she received a multitude of lucky breaks that boosted her career. Gladwell uses Bill Gates as an example of how breaks similar to the ones that Walters received contributed to success made him a millionaire.
According to Gladwell, Gates’ “ lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high” (Gladwell, 267). Like Gates, Walters seized the lucky opportunities she got and turned them into something larger. She just happened to be the right age at the right time, and that turned into opportunities.
Her first ‘break’ happened when NBC hired her to be a writer of the “Today Show” when the previous female writer left. At the time, the station only had one female writer at once, so Walters stepped in.
This single lucky break led to many more measurable opportunities that accumulated for her over time. Gradually, Walters began appearing more on screen, until finally, she reached another golden opportunity. NBC hired her as their “Today Girl” after they fired their previous woman because they deemed her unfit to handle political material (Mirkson).
“These points in her life launched her career, and her success grew. And they were really only determined by luck.”
These points in her life launched her career, and her success grew. And they were really only determined by luck. If NBC did not let the other women go, then Walters would not have gotten the opportunities to achieve that she did.
If her family background and golden opportunities weren’t enough to push her to success, Walters also took advantage of her obstacles, illustrating Gladwell’s idea of having desirable disadvantages. Gladwell demonstrates this by using an example of Joe Flom, a Jewish lawyer in the 1950’s. Flom faced adversity as he came from a poor and Jewish family, and because of this he never got hired for large cases. However, he took whatever came in the door and worked on “proxy fights” and “hostile takeovers” that big-name lawyers did not want to cover (Gladwell, 125). “Then the world changed and he was ready. He didn’t triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity” (128).
Similar to Flom, Walters had her fair share of disadvantages that she turned into opportunities. She worked in a man’s world, where she stood out for the wrong reasons, as a woman. She later acknowledged her disadvantages, saying, “I’m not sure, when I look back, that I was the right woman. I think that my delivery, my appearance, maybe everything about me, worked against me. There was a feeling that the man was more authoritative. And to some degree, that feeling hasn’t changed” (“Lessons”). Neither her co-workers nor the media outlets took her seriously when she started out. Even when she worked on the air full-time, her male counterparts did not consider her as their co-anchor because they refused to have a female co-anchor (“Barbara Walters”).
One of the men who worked with Walters was Frank McGee. His time on-air with Walters changed everything for her career. When he conducted interviews, he would never let Walters choose the guest, and only let her ask one question at the end after he asked three, which she found many problems with. But, as she stated in her memoir, “no one had said I couldn’t go after my own important interviews, and do them outside of the studio. Therefore, that’s what I did.” (Walters, 206).
Soon, this disadvantage that she faced became more desirable. She could interview whomever she wanted from A-list celebrities, to politicians, to regular people who made the news. And she could do this in a space they were comfortable, which aided in the creation of her signature “personal journalism” style. Her interviews gained attention from the press, and lead to even more opportunities in her career. Walters’ ability to bring the spaces of celebrities into the homes of viewers across the nation made her become a common name.
Her ability to make advantages out of her obstacles exemplifies Gladwell’s idea of desirable disadvantages. Like Joe Flom, she lived in the right place at the right time and faced adversities, which ultimately drove her to success.
These desirable disadvantages that she had, combined with her family background which led her to golden opportunities that really caused her stand out and become what Gladwell would define as an Outlier.
While Walters worked hard to become successful, few can go far on this alone. As Gladwell stated, “[Success] is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities- and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them” (Gladwell, 267). The factor that really drove her to success was that she captured every opportunity that she had, and took advantage of every situation that she found herself in. And she had the fortunate ability to be in the right place at the right time.
Barbara Walters sits on a plane in Cairo, Egypt with journalists John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite, along with the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. They fly en route to Israel to meet up with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin for a historic visit. Using her social savvy, Walters writes a question requesting an interview on a piece of paper and slips it to one of Sadat’s aids. Sadat sends the note back, agreeing to the interview.
When they reach Jerusalem, Walters talks to Begin, who tells her that he convinced Sadat to do an interview together. So, the two men sit down with Walters to do a groundbreaking joint-interview.
Seconds after it hit the air, CBS airs Cronkite’s unedited version of the very same interview. And at the end of his time, he could be heard saying “Did Barbara get anything that I didn’t?” (Walters).
Works Cited
“Barbara Walters: Her Story.” ABC News Specials. Season 1, episode 76. ABC News, 16, May, 2014. Hulu, https://www.hulu.com/watch/637709.
“Business.” World Future Review, vol. 1, no 2, Apr/May 2009, pp 81–89. EBSCOhost. ezproxy.bethel.edu/loginurl=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=keh&AN=41577396&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. Back Bay Books. 2008
“Lessons from the Front Lines” Newsweek, 13, Oct. 2008, pp. 73–74,
ezproxy.bethel.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=34651824&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 20, Apr. 2018.
Lewinsky, Monica. “In Her Own Words: Interview by Barbara Walters” 20/20, ABC, 3 Mar. 1999.
Mirkinson, Jack.” How Barbara Walters Changed Everything.” Huffington Post. 16 May 2017.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/16/barbara-walters-retirement-career-legacy_n_5312103.html.
Satin, Michael J. “What Barbara Walters Can Teach Us About Direct Examination.” Trial
Practice, Winter 2017, p. 3+. Expanded Academic ASAP, http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.bethel.edu/apps/doc/A487433619/EAIM?u=clic_bethel&sid=EAIM&xid=bf28af54
Walters, Barbara. “Audition: A Memoir.” Knope, 2008.
Winfrey, Oprah. “Oprah: The Next Chapter.” Barbara Walters Special, ABC, 9 Dec. 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Osterlund
Laura Osterlund, a freshman from St. Paul, Minn., seeks a journalism internship to help her achieve her dream of becoming a big-time broadcast journalist. Osterlund likes playing Ultimate Frisbee, blasting show tunes in her car, and eating a heaping plate of her mom’s homemade spaghetti and meatballs.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED:
Write actively, avoiding passive verbs. “Is”es and “are”s and “was”es and “were”s are “gross,” so avoid using them at all costs.
Use dog-naming techniques to add more description to the writing. Give details to the little things, and avoid using adverbs that simply just tell the reader what something looks like. Instead, use words to show the reader something, and let them draw their own conclusions from what they see.
Drop the reader in a moment. Invite the reader into the time and place of the subject. Let the reader experience the moment.
Speak confidently. Learn the material of the speech. If you get tripped up in your speech, work your way through it, and keep going.
Don’t be afraid to speak up. If you see something that needs critiquing, say something. It will only help the person.
Success can’t be achieved with hard work alone. It takes lucky opportunities, 10,000 hours, and family legacy.
The spread of Airwalk shoes can be connected to the spread of the AIDS epidemic.
Even the biggest disadvantages can be made desirable, you just need to find the right opportunities.
Snap after someone presents, don’t clap.
Don’t be afraid to loudly shout “GO”.
