The Reluctant Whore

The New York Post reports that, just as was suspected all along, despite what Barbara Walters said about how she thought the story was “tawdry” and had lost interest in it because of journalistic integrity, the factor that defined which network that got the post jail interview with Paris Hilton was money.

What a surprise.

ABC did not offer as much money as CNN did for the merciless, patronising hour of Paris with Larry King so the Hiltons went with King – despite the weeks and weeks of matronly apolitical ass kissing from Barbara Walters that we were forced to endure on The View. We were forced to kind of because Rosie was on the show and therefore it was interesting.

When Barbara Walters spoke with the Post about how she had backed out due to her own intergrity it reeked of resentment and seemed like she was lashing out at the Hiltons for letting her down. This report seems to conclude the whole thing fairly predictably by saying she was shocked that they didn't go with her after she was a mouthpiece for Paris while she was in jail. All of a sudden, totally disregarding the ratings issue, Walters said she thought it wasn't a serious story.

But still, even though Walters looks like a sore loser in the whole thing, the real loser is NBC who offered a million bucks and, as was reported on Perez Hilton, even had a codeword for the deal so no one would find out. When everyone found out the code word “Rome” meant “Checkbook journalism acquired interview with Paris Hilton”, NBC was shamed to the corner.

So, in short, while Barbara Walters is a controlling old woman who is steadily losing her grip and relevance on “The View”, a show that is back to being bland after Rosie left, she can take heart that underneath all that old Manhattan classism, she still looks better than NBC who really did publicly fail. Fail. Failure. A lot of real, almost physical failure. [source]