PASADENA, Calif. – A standing ovation greeted the WNBA’s Brittney
Griner over the weekend when the basketball star and her wife, Cherelle,
stunned the audience by walking out onto the stage at the NAACP Image
Awards in Pasadena, Calif.
As Deadline reported,
Queen Latifah was speaking about the resilience of Black people
Saturday night, when she said, “We stay overcoming because that’s what
we do!” Then, she introduced the Griners: “As we gather here tonight, In
the spirit of overcoming adversity, I want to take this moment to
recognize someone who has done just that.”
The crowd roared as they appeared on stage with broad smiles, holding
hands. Brittney wore an elegant black tuxedo and unbuttoned button-down
white shirt, with Cherelle decked out in a regal purple pantsuit. . .
The Phoenix Mercury player, who just re-signed with the team this month, regained her freedom in December 2022 in a prisoner swap between Russia and the United States.
The 32-year-old missed the entire 2022 season following her arrest in
Moscow one year ago. Russian authorities said she broke their law by
packing vape canisters with cabbabis oil in her luggage. In August, Griner was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony for drug smuggling, and that sentence was upheld upon appeal in October.
Griner was finally exchanged in
the United Arab Emirates for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. He had
served 10 years of a 25-year-sentence for conspiring to sell weapons to a
terrorist group. Russia balked at the Biden administration’s request to
secure the release of businessman and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan,
who is still serving a 16-year prison sentence in Russia for spying.
“Let’s keep fighting to bring home every American still detained overseas,” Griner told the audience at the award ceremony. . ." READ MORE
NEW YORK – If ever there was a gold standard for American broadcast
journalists the likely two top choices would be famed CBS reporter and
anchor Walter Cronkite and the groundbreaking ABC News reporter and
anchor Barbara Walters.
The news came late Friday that the latter, a legendary broadcast
journalist had died peacefully surrounded by family and friends at her
home in New York City at age 93. Walters shattered the glass ceiling in
her profession and became a dominant force in an industry once dominated
by men. Walters is survived by her adopted daughter Jacqueline.
Without a doubt Walters likely holds a record for the shear number of
interviews of the rich and famous, political leaders, as well as
celebrities from every walk of life and endeavor. Walters, who won 12
Emmy awards, 11 of those while at ABC News was inducted into the
Television Hall of Fame in 1989.
In her fifty-plus year career as a broadcast journalist she had
earned nearly universal acclaim, respect and admiration for her work.
At ABC News as the co-anchor of the network’s extremely successful
award winning 20/20 televised news magazine, she interviewed the people
who made history in the mid twentieth century into the early
twenty-first century conducting her last interview, of then businessman
and potential presidential candidate Donald Trump, in 2015.
Walters began her national broadcastcareer on NBC’s The Today Show as
a reporter, writer and panel member before being promoted to co-host in
1974. Her rising popularity with viewers resulted in Walters receiving
more airtime, and in 1974, NBC executives promoted her to be the co-host
of the program, the first woman ever to hold such a title on an
American news program
Walters joined ABC News in 1976 after , becoming the first female
anchor on an evening news program. Three years later, she became a
co-host of “20/20,” and in 1997, she launched “The View.”
Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company which is the parent
company of ABC News, praised Walters as someone who broke down barriers.
“Barbara was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in
journalism but for journalism itself. She was a one-of-a-kind reporter
who landed many of the most important interviews of our time, from heads
of state to the biggest celebrities and sports icons. I had the
pleasure of calling Barbara a colleague for more than three decades, but
more importantly, I was able to call her a dear friend. She will be
missed by all of us at The Walt Disney Company, and we send our deepest
condolences to her daughter, Jacqueline,” Iger said in a statement
Friday.
She made her final appearance as a co-host of “The View” in 2014, but
remained an executive producer of the show and continued to do some
interviews and specials for ABC News.
“I do not want to appear on another program or climb another
mountain,” she said at the time. “I want instead to sit on a sunny field
and admire the very gifted women — and OK, some men too — who will be
taking my place.”
From American presidents to her famed interview with Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat, along the way Walters touched on the lives of
diverse and dynamic cross-section of humanity.
Her face to face conversations included face-to-face convos with
folks like actors Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, Patrick Swayze, Fred
Astaire. She spoke with musicians such as Michael Jackson, Justin
Bieber, Barbra Streisand, and without missing a beat the significant
political figures of her day like Henry Kissinger, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro. Her interviews with
Oprah and Monica Lewinsky shot the network’s ratings audiences through
the roof.
The New York Times reported in 1999 that Walters’ interview with
Lewinsky, the former White House intern who was a key component in the
impeachment trial of then President Bill Clinton, “attracted an average
of 48.5 million viewers, and an estimated 70 million people watched all
or part of the two-hour program, in about 33.2 million homes.”
Walters directly asked Lewinsky, “You showed the president your thong
underwear. Where did you get the nerve? I mean — who does that?” she
said. She also asked the 25-year-old: “Where was your self-respect,
where was your self-esteem?”
The list of people in front of the camera with her on The Barbara Walters Specials
was breathtaking. Yet the stories of everyday folks, their lives, and
struggles were a staple of her work searching out stories that needed to
be told.
For the LGBTQ+ community, Walters often told the stories that painted
a picture that was critical in putting a human face on an oft times
maligned community. Her ABC Documentary on transgender children
originally broadcast in 2007, introduced the world to trans girl Jazz
Jennings, who was at six years of age at the time, and her hugely
supportive family.
The Hollywood Reporter noted in an honest interview, Ellen
DeGeneres talked to Walters about everything from her movie career to
her decision to come out as a lesbian. She also opened up about her
stepfather sexually abusing her and how she broke through a window one
night to get away.
Walters in later years did have her share of detractors among younger
journalists and writers including Alex Pareene, the former
editor-in-chief of online news site Gawker and later a staff writer
at The New Republic in 2019.
Pareene penned an unflattering profile of Walters on May 13, 2013 in Salon headlined Good riddance, Barbara Walters.
He noted: “[…] current co-host of “The View,” is a national icon and a
pioneer, and probably as responsible as any other living person for the
ridiculous and sorry state of American television journalism. She has
announced her retirement a year in advance, so that a series of
aggrandizing specials can be produced celebrating her long and storied
career. So let’s get things started off right, by reminding everyone how
her entire public life has been an extended exercise in sycophancy and
unalloyed power worship.
Pareene also took aim at her relationship with ” Roy Cohn, the notorious scumbag McCarthyite mob attorney.”
Writing about the relationship between the two Pareene notes:
[…] she, legendarily, pretended to be seeing (romantically) Roy Cohn,
the notorious scumbag McCarthyite mob attorney who was also,
notoriously, a closeted gay man (who had persecuted closeted “deviants”
while working with McCarthy). Cohn was one of the slimiest and most
detestable characters of the entire 20th century.
He was finally disbarred,
in part for his hospital visit to a dying and incapacitated millionaire
in which Cohn held up the man’s hand and had him “sign” a codicil to
his will naming Cohn the trustee of his estate. Despite his moral
bankruptcy, Cohn remained a member of elite Washington and New York
society his entire life.
Walters said she was and remained close to him because he helped her father with a legal matter when she was a girl. But this also seems to explain why they were “dating” in the 1950s:
Did Cohn have a secret “nice” side? She was asked.
“I would not use the word nice,” she laughs. “He was very smart. And
funny. And, at the time, seemed to know everyone in New York. He was
very friendly with the cardinal, he was very friendly with the most
famous columnist in New York, Walter Winchell, he had a lot of extremely
powerful friends.”
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