Barbara Walters Tried To Get Assad Aide a Job
Image by Joella Marano via Wiki Commons
As if Barbara Walters’s exclusive soft-ball interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad last December wasn’t bad enough, now there is word that the 82-year-old host of “The View” has inappropriately used her influence to further the career of one of the brutal dictator’s closest aides.
The Telegraph reports that Walters tried to help Sheherazad Jaafari, the daughter of Syria’s UN ambassador, get a spot at the Columbia School of Journalism and an internship with CNN’s Piers Morgan show. When Syrian opposition activists got a hold of email exchanges between Walters and Jaafari, 22, they confronted Walters with them, and she admitted that she had been acting with a conflict of interest and apologized.
The young Jaafari apparently advises Assad on Western media issues, and she met Walters when the ABC journalist began lobbying for an interview with the Syrian president. It was Jaafari who had written, “[The] American psyche can be easily manipulated” in talking points for her boss prior to the interview with Walters. Jaafari’s father, Bashar Jaafari, had been acquainted with Walters for seven years prior to the two women’s establishing contact with one another.
By all accounts, Walters seems to have taken a shine to the young and attractive Jaafari following the Assad interview and stayed in touch with her, even calling her “dear girl,” and signing her messages with “Hugs, Barbara.” The young woman referred to the veteran American journalist as her “adopted mother.”
Walters did make some calls to people in power, but in the end Jaafari neither enrolled in Columbia nor took any job with CNN. In apology for her actions, Walters explained: “In the aftermath [of the Assad interview], Ms Jaafari returned to the US and contacted me looking for a job. I told her that was a serious conflict of interest and that we would not hire her. I did offer to mention her to contacts at another media organization and in academia, though she didn’t get a job or into school. In retrospect, I realize that this created a conflict and I regret that.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
