Pope Benedict XVI retired.
And so, soon, shall Barbara Walters.
The announcement on “The View” on Monday that Ms. Walters will leave ABC
in 2014 was less a farewell than the kickoff of a drawn-out abdication
ritual.
“I plan to retire from appearing on television at all,” Ms. Walters, 83,
said after a slick highlights reel spanning 50 years of “gets” (Fidel
Castro, Monica Lewinsky) was played. “There will be special occasions,
and I will come back — I’m not walking into the sunset — but I don’t
want to appear on another program or climb another mountain.”
And that star turn on “The View” was a helpful reminder of two things.
Obviously, Ms. Walters’s remarkable ascent from the secretarial pool of
the “Mad Men” era to anchor desks and presidential yachts serves as a
timeline of the women’s movement.
Just as significantly, however, her career mirrors the trajectory of
television. Intuitively, knowingly or just luckily, Ms. Walters has
moved — and is moving — in concert with tastes and audiences and real
influence. She defected from nighttime to daytime just as many viewers
were doing the same. For politicians and newsmakers, a loosey-goosey
appearance on “The View” under her watch took on more value and
resonance than a hard-hitting interview on any network evening news
program.
And now, as more and more viewers leave broadcast television altogether,
so does she. If she followed this road to its true conclusion, there
would be a Barbara Walters video game for the Xbox.
Network news long ago began losing viewers and prestige. But now
broadcast television itself seems ready for pasture. Every network has
lost ground with the viewers most coveted by advertisers, those ages 18
to 49. Some of the best — and most watched — shows are on cable networks
like AMC and FX. Netflix, Amazon and other companies are all getting
into the production game.
In the era of Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour, it’s
hard to believe that there was a time when the networks considered the
evening news too important to entrust to a woman, and paired Ms. Walters with a more authoritative-looking Harry Reasoner.
The year was 1976, and many critics complained that Ms. Walters’s rise
represented the fall of respectable television journalism, that her
focus on personality and personal lives was too soapy and shallow for
serious-minded viewers.
Now, of course, the pendulum has swung so far toward celebrity gossip
and news-you-can-use on “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “World News” and “CBS
Evening News” that Ms. Walters seems like a pillar of old-school
journalism. But she pioneered the blurring of news and entertainment for
a half-century without losing her authority. She put the Kardashians on
her list of the 10 most fascinating people of the year in 2011; that year she also interviewed the embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad about his country’s uprising.
The current chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company,
Robert A. Iger, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York appeared on
“The View” on Monday. Even though those men were paying homage to a
television legend, it didn’t seem as if Ms. Walters had grown too old to
keep working; it seemed as if the television legend had decided that
the medium was too old to contain her drive.
Evening newscasts are clearly no longer the pinnacle of network
prestige; for important newsmakers they are now a flyover between the
hubs of morning talk shows and late-night comedy. There was a big to-do
when Ms. Couric left NBC for CBS in 2006 to become the first woman
appointed to be a permanent solo anchor of a network evening news show.
That historic milestone quickly faded. After five years Ms. Couric left
behind the sagging ratings and growing irrelevance of evening news and
is now back in favor with an afternoon talk show, “Katie,” that was renewed by ABC for a second season.
Even daytime talk shows are on the losing side of entertainment history.
“The View” is one of the leaders, and its ratings are in decline. “The
Oprah Winfrey Show,” at its height in the 1990s, had 12 million to 13
million viewers. Even during her latter years on the air, Ms. Winfrey
averaged about 6 million; Ms. Couric is holding her own with about 2.5
million.
Cast members come and go, but Ms. Walters is not just the creator of
“The View,” she’s television personified, and word of her retirement was
the subject of leaks weeks ago. Her plans for a farewell tour include
specials and retrospectives and one last Oscar pregame extravaganza. It
seems that the ever-ratings-minded Ms. Walters delayed a formal
announcement until May to coincide with a sweeps month.
On Monday she playfully asked Mr. Iger, who is planning to retire in
2015, what they should do with their free time. He used the occasion to
plug an ABC hit show that, like so many other network crowd pleasers, is
also losing steam. “The two of us love to dance,” Mr. Iger said. “I say
we go on ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ ”
Network television is in its twilight years.
Ms. Walters is quitting at the top by letting others bottom out.
