RIVALS TO THE END

New Details Surface on Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer’s Beef

Despite the two being bitter rivals, Sawyer also conceded, “We spent a lot of time laughing and forging a real friendship.”

A biography of Barbara Walters has pulled back the curtain on her decades-long rivalry with Diane Sawyer. Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker, shared an excerpt with Vanity Fair detailing the dueling journalists’ beef, which was the “talk of the town” at ABC, where they spent years poaching each other’s guests and battling to be the top woman in TV news. The excerpt described Walters’ disdain at ABC’s hiring of Sawyer after she shot up the ranks at CBS—in contrast to the slow, job-by-job rise Walters endured. Page wrote that Walters viewed her 1989 hiring at ABC as a “betrayal,” adding that network president Roone Arledge was both Walters’ “savior” for taking a chance on her and her “nemesis” for bringing Sawyer aboard. Just 30 minutes after learning Sawyer’s hiring was imminent, Arledge said Walters called him in a rage, asking, “How is someone of my stature supposed to divide up things with her?” Speaking on her relationship with the late Walters, Sawyer said the two also spent time “laughing and forging a real friendship.”