Barbara Walters filled in as guest anchor today on ABC’s This Week. The program featured Walters’ interview of Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown, as well as a roundtable discussion with Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, and The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington. It was Ailes’s first This Week appearance (“I was waiting for HD,” Ailes quipped. “I look so much better.”).
Excerpts:
• Walters held up the 1982 Cosmopolitan magazine issue that featured the photo of a nearly-nude Brown. “I wish I still looked like that!” Brown said. “Well, I’m not going to ask you to prove it!” Walters responded.
AdvertisementLater in the broadcast Walter revealed that, coincidentally, the same Cosmo issue included a profile of her (“Keeping Up With Barbara Walters”).
• Walters asked Ailes about FNC’s relationship with the Obama administration. Ailes: “Well, they tried to ban us. They tried to break the pool, but the other networks stepped up and protected Fox on it…[But now w]e’re fine. I mean…it was not as bad as it was played, and things are not as great as they should be, but we have a good dialogue.”
• Huffington asked Ailes about Glenn Beck, whom she says uses language that is “inciting the American people”. The exchange:
Ailes: “I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be…”
Huffington: “It’s not about the word police. It’s about something deeper. It’s about…the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there…”
Ailes: “I agree with you. I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor…”
Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper will rotate in as guest host next Sunday. Clips of Brown and Ailes from today’s show, after the jump…
Walters and Senator-elect Scott Brown discuss Brown’s 1982 Cosmopolitan photo:
Ailes jokes with Walters that he’d pose nude for a lot less money than Cosmo paid Brown: