Barbara Walters, the journalist who paved the way for all others, has died at the age of 93.
Steph Deschamps / December 31, 2022
The American journalist Barbara Walters, the first woman to have presented an evening news in the United States, died at the age of 93, announced Friday her long-time employer, the ABC channel.
This legend of the American broadcasting landscape had said goodbye in 2014, with a "see you soon" in French, after more than 50 years of television. She was then 84 years old.
The American channel did not give the cause of death or specify where Barbara Walters died.
Barbara Walters had interviewed all U.S. presidents since Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, but also foreign leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Anwar Sadat and Fidel Castro, the Dalai Lama or other celebrities like Bette Davis and Angelina Jolie.
She became a celebrity herself in the American news world, especially with the daily show "The View" that she created in 1997 on ABC.
The journalist had won 12 Emmy Awards.
When she left in 2014, she said she was happy to have been a pioneer in a profession long reserved for men. Hillary Clinton came to pay tribute to her, as well as television host and producer Oprah Winfrey and about 20 women television journalists.
In 1976, she was the first woman to anchor the ABC Evening News, earning an unprecedented salary of $1 million a year.
Two years earlier, she had co-anchored a morning show on NBC. But that was a flop, she recalled 40 years later: "My male co-anchor didn't want a (female) partner and neither did the audience.
She went on to make a name for herself with her uniquely stylized interviews with everyone from Vladimir Putin and Michael Jackson to Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.
Her proudest achievement was helping to bring women journalists to television. "If I did anything to help that, that's my legacy," she said as recently as 2014.