“If someone had built to order the woman most likely to set off Barbara Walters, she would have looked a lot like Diane Sawyer,” Susan Page wrote in
“If someone had built to order the woman most likely to set off Barbara Walters, she would have looked a lot like Diane Sawyer,” Susan Page wrote in her 2024 book The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. “If Diane was cool and aloof, Barbara was hot, intense, in your face. Diane glided. Barbara charged.”
In the documentary, former 20/20 executive producer Victor Neufeld confirms that Walters was unhappy when Sawyer arrived on the scene, given their similar purviews. “Barbara watched Diane warily, because she was really in the same altitude as Barbara,” 20/20 producer Martin Clancy says in the film. “Other correspondents were not a threat. I think Barbara secretly resented Diane for being younger.”
Also a sore spot for Walters? Sawyer’s looks. “She was certainly dogged by Diane’s very existence. She often said Diane was the perfect woman,” says NBC’s Cynthia McFadden in the film. “She used the word ‘a blonde goddess.’ This was an ideal woman, and Barbara couldn’t compete with that. She could work harder. She could know more people. But she couldn’t compete with that.”
Sawyer, who does not appear in the documentary, has admitted to some discord between her and Walters. “When I arrived, I’m sure it was confusing to her because interviews had been her sole terrain,” Sawyer told Page for her book. “I was always working on some long-form, delving into violence in schools or something that had really intrigued me. So I never felt that shows I was on, or my career, depended on interviews solely, but I understood what they meant to her. When I started doing some interviews, I think it must have thrown her.”
The doc delves into one particularly tense showdown, when Walters and Sawyer competed to interview Katharine Hepburn. Sawyer got the story, despite Walters’ attempts to sway the Oscar winner to her side. “If I showed up on Mars, they would have a note there with the Barbara Walters stationary that is just requesting an interview with anybody who might happen to show,” Sawyer jokes in footage shown in the documentary.
“I know that nobody, maybe, will believe this,” Sawyer told Page for her book, “but we spent a lot of time laughing and forging a real friendship, and that was true even when I first arrived.. I could share anything with her, and I know she shared things with me, things that were very close to the bone.”
Walters also denied ever having a full-on feud with Sawyer, saying via voiceover in the doc: “I don’t think Diane Sawyer and I had a feud. I think people know that we were after the same [interview] gets.” And when she died in 2022, Sawyer paid tribute to her sometime rival in a statement: “Barbara was a trailblazer, a singular force who opened the door for every woman in television news.”
Connie Chung
Chung and Walters in 2001.Theo Wargo
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