At age 47, Barbara Walters broke the glass ceiling for women in broadcast journalism, reportedly becoming co-anchor of a network evening news program at ABC in 1976. She also negotiated a salary that broke records, $1 million a year, becoming the first newsperson to get such a sum.
Walters broke through every barrier and paved the way for more women in broadcasting, including Connie Chung, Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Norah O’Donnell and others.
See more broadcast news legends through the years.
One of today’s most recognizable journalists, Anderson Cooper is the anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°.” Before joining CNN, he was an ABC News correspondent and host of the network’s reality program “The Mole.” Cooper also anchored ABC’s overnight newscast “World News Now.”
Megyn Kelly was at Fox News for 12 years and now hosts “The Megyn Kelly Show”, a talk show and podcast that airs daily on Sirius XM’s Triumph channel. She previously hosted “America Live” and “The Kelly File” at Fox, and later anchored “Megyn Kelly Today” at NBC News from 2017 to 2018. She was ousted from the network after defending blackface Halloween costumes.
ABC television news anchor Peter Jennings, seen here with then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, was a Canadian American journalist who served as the anchor of “ABC World News Tonight” for 22 years from 1983 until his death from lung cancer in 2005.
“Along with Tom Brokaw at NBC and Dan Rather at CBS, Jennings formed part of the ‘Big Three’ news anchors who dominated American evening network news from the early 1980s until his death in 2005,” the Television Academy states.
