The Outstanding Interviewer

What makes an outstanding interviewer?

Barbara Walters, the American journalist who died on New Year’s Eve, was the quintessential interviewer for a number of reasons.

She began her journalistic career as a researcher and brought these qualities to her interviews. Not only were her interviews well researched, but she also leveraged what she learned about her interviewees strong and weak points and then knew how to probe without making them feel uncomfortable. 

“I do so much homework, I know more about the person than he or she knows about themselves,” Walters said in a 2014 television special.

She had the power to connect effectively with both her audiences and interviewees. She skillfully questioned them with great skill, made them feel as though their secrets were safe and that their vulnerability would not lead to negative consequences. She was highly skilled at creating a sense of intimacy in her interviews even when she asked blunt, cutting questions.

She smashed glass ceiling after glass ceiling, becoming the first woman anchor at a major American network, the first journalist to earn over a million dollars per year, and the best in the industry at getting scoops.

This made her the darling of female journalists everywhere and this has been recognized by many as a sine qua non for their own success. Indeed, another famous interviewer, Oprah Winfrey, has said that without Barbara Walters there would be no Oprah.

She faced down the misogyny of many male journalists in her day, finding novel ways to circumvent their opposition to a female journalist taking the lead in major network broadcasts. She was also an expert at identifying ways to circumvent male hostility among her interviewees and turning it to her advantage.

Her joint interview in 1977 with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was the likely start to developing their chemistry that eventually resulted in the historic Camp David Accords that achieved a lasting peace between both countries that has lasted to this very day. 

The interview also irked journalistic luminaries such as Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor who tried to follow up with their own interviews of Sadat and Begin after Walters’s coup.

Walters had the ability to follow up on inadvertent statements by her interviewees and to go deeper into their thinking. She famously got ex-President Richard Nixon to admit that his mistake was not destroying the famous tapes that led to his downfall and that his biggest blunder was taping his conversations in the first place.

She also challenged Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by asking him why Cuba had no free press, to which Castro responded that “my concept of freedom of the press is not yours”. Despite her challenging and probing questions, the Cuban leader obliged her with a further interview a few years later.

"During our times together, he made clear to me that he was an absolute dictator and that he was a staunch opponent of democracy," Walters said in her statement. "I told him that what we most profoundly disagreed on was the meaning of freedom."

In the 2014 television special that commemorated her retirement from TV journalism, Walters showed off an autographed photo from Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that hung on her wall: “For the longest and most difficult interview I’ve ever done in my life.”

She challenged the Shah of Iran two years before the revolution by asking him “so you don’t feel that women are in that sense equal, if they have the same intelligence or ability?” to which the Shah replied “not so far. Maybe you will become in the future. We can always have some exceptions””. 

She was a living legend, and interviewer who didn’t shy away from asking the tough questions yet connected with her interviewees with empathy and charm. She held them to account and cared about bringing the truth to light.

She will be missed in this era of soft journalism and biased media.

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Edición: Laura Espejo