Things got messy this week with the girlfriends on "The View."
What was supposed to be a carefully choreographed series of lies, told to save face, spare feelings and protect careers, devolved into a nasty catfight, leaving a veteran newswoman, Barbara Walters, in the position not only of having admitted lying, but of accusing her now-former co-host, Star Jones Reynolds, of lacking dignity for \o7failing \f7to lie about why she was leaving the show.
Jones Reynolds, for her part, had already been slammed for (allegedly) lying about how she lost more than 100 pounds. And of course, the woman who accused her of that, "The View's" new co-host, Rosie O'Donnell, lied for \o7years \f7about having a deep crush on Tom Cruise ... before she came out of the closet.
Everybody in TV lies, of course. To save face, to save feelings, to save careers.
But rarely do the lies come apart so publicly and -- quite frankly -- so deliciously.
And rarely is a journalist such as Walters, whose main asset is her credibility, after all, forced to admit to tangoing with the truth. "I have always told the truth on this program," Walters told the New York Daily News on Tuesday, "except in the case of Star."
Her big lie: Last May, when O'Donnell was hired to replace Meredith Vieira, Walters tried to dampen speculation that Jones Reynolds' contract would not be renewed for a 10th season. "If Star wants to continue to be there," Walters told the New York Times, "she is welcome."
As it turns out, not so much.
"This was not one of Barbara Walters' finest moments," said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. "The one person who can stabilize the equation is the one person who has done more harm than good."
Walters, of course, had known for months that ABC would not renew Jones Reynolds' contract. As Walters told reporters this week, Jones Reynolds' "negatives" were going up and the public was starting to doubt her veracity. (A lot of that going around, Barbara.) "They didn't believe some of the things she said," Walters told one reporter. "There are very strong reasons why they felt she had lost the audience," she told another.
