Barbara Walters was a pioneer in American broadcast journalism. This post will revisit earlier posts about her, but will be shorter and more on-topic. I did an interview over at Fakeologist recently during which we reviewed my work on her. I decided that work I had done before on this subject was unconvincing due to my use of gif’s instead of face splits for evidence. I am the one who slaved over the computer with the gif’s, and so could see how easily the faces overlaid one another. I could easily see that Jim Morrison’s alleged girlfriend, Pam Courson, pictured above, stepped into the shoes of the original Barbara Walters, and yet the work to outside viewers was not convincing. I realized I needed to go back to face splits and stick with them.
“Barbara Walters” may have been a real name of a real person. She was chosen to be the first woman to star in NBC’s Today Show, a very popular morning show that has run now for 72 years, since 1952. Like all of news, not just TV news, the field was dominated by white males, and it was time to get some women involved. Consequently, the network needed a groundbreaker.
I am refraining from any criticisms of the women’s movement, which addressed real problems, or of the original Barbara Walters or her replacement, Pam Courson. Either of the women was in the public spotlight, one for a short time, and one for decades. Both endured criticism and ridicule. In 1976 Saturday Night Live performer Gilda Radner did an impersonation of Walters that captured the nation, ridiculing her for a lisp and calling her “Baba Wawa”. In my view, if Walters lisped at all, it was barely detectable.
But therre’s more to it. 1976 was the year that Pamela Courson replaced the original Barbara Walters, and I think the Radner piece was used as misdirection while NBC ushered out the old and in the new. The people who control the public mind are clever in the extreme.
But why the replacement? Below is a photo of the original BW:
Note in the photo above the slumped shoulders and poor posture. It is just my opinion, but I think that having made a big deal of featuring the first prominent female on-air daytime journalist, NBC could not back down. And yet, the woman above was not cutting it. So NBC moved one out and another in using SNL and Radner as distraction while the switch was made. Below is a face split of the new and original BW.
As can be seen, there is no alignment there.
So what happened to the original Walters? I cannot know, but imagine she was paid well and signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) as she faded into obscurity.
By the way, the official dates for Walters are 9-25-1929 to 12-30/2022, death at age 93. Pam Courson’s birth is listed as 12/22/1946, a 17-year difference. Such discrepancies create problems and questions, but overall I judged that the two, Walters and Courson, looked so much alike, and that the original Walters looked so different from the replacement, that there was no other available solution. How to account for 17 years? Assume neither birthday is accurate, split the difference, and suggest that possibly that Courson died young in 2022. Perhaps if she did not really die that year, when Courson would have allegedly been age 76, she entered retirement with yet another new identity in a place unknown.
Pam Courson was said to have died of a heroin overdose on April 25, 1974, surely a fake incident. That would have allowed two years for her to be groomed to take over as Walters. Here is a face split of the two, with the one on the right a young Barbara Walters:
The nose misalignment on the comparison first above is due to the woman on the right facing to her right, so that most of the nose leaves the picture. It’s very hard to get photos of people both not smiling and looking straight at the camera. But the facial features all align.
The second matchup is as good as matchups get. Did Courson undergo plastic surgery to become Barbara? No! And notice in the second photo right above, we are even looking at the same teeth.
I recall at the time I wrote the original piece that there was some criticism and a lot of doubt about the work. That is probably due to the inability of gifs to carry the load of persuasion to skeptics. I hope the above comparisons offer a better case that the original Barbara Walters disappeared from view, and was replaced by Jim Morrison’s fake girlfriend, Pam Courson.
In the original piece I did on this subject, I put a lot of work into notes on Walters’ career and photo comparisons that might or might not be relevant. However, I do not want to cover that ground again. If you are curious, please check out the original piece here.
Piece of Mindful 