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“Tell me everything,” Barbara Walters used to urge her TV guests. She believed she could coax the truth out of anyone, whether revered or disgraced, and so did her viewers.

Her confidence would be challenged today when every fragment of news, even neighborhood trivia, disappears in a blur of distrust. Since viewers no longer believe what they hear, she’d wonder, might her interviewees become too constrained about what they say?

President Trump distrusts the news media so intensely he limits his announcements to his website, even when they’re nakedly bogus (“lasting disarmament”?) .

If that revered truth-teller Walter Cronkite were alive today it’s doubtful whether even he could cast a clear focus on Gaza or Tehran, on Zelenskyy or Netanyahu. Frustrated, he might even unleash AI on Ice just to see what emerges.

Media reporting on immigration purges is so distrusted that entire new layers of fact-finders have...

The documentary Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is a film much like its subject: sharp, uncomfortably direct, and possessed of a ferocious intelligence that refuses to settle for simple answers. It presents a life that was a constant negotiation between a public persona of empathetic inquiry and a private reality of steel-willed ambition.

Here was a woman who did not just report on the seismic cultural shifts of the 20th century; she was one of them, a genuine trailblazer who shattered the stained-glass ceiling of broadcast news with methodical determination.

Yet the film does not sanitize its subject. It understands that the same person who could disarm a dictator with a disarmingly human question could also maintain a perplexing, decades-long friendship with the political fixer Roy Cohn.

The film sets its hook not by promising a tribute, but by promising a full accounting of a deeply complicated and significant American figure.

“Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” is a documentary a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows just when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with clear-eyed worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power.

“Tell Me Everything” delivers the Barbara Walters story, in all its tasty fascination and significance, and it captures a great deal about Walters as a person because it refuses to be intimidated by how elusive she could be. On TV, she presented herself as a fighting mensch, someone who could disarm you with that sympathetic twinkle in her eye. Yet off camera she could be ruthless. She burned through romantic relationships as if they were seasonal shopping sprees, and one of her closest friends was the dreaded Roy Cohn. She was complicated.

The temptation to deliver scrubbed-clean hagiography with “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” had to have been there: The journalist, who died at 93 in 2022, was the very definition of trailblazer, a woman who worked harder than all the men around her in the extraordinarily testosterone-filled boys club that was midcentury broadcast news, and all but single-handedly paved the way for women to have prominent on-air roles ever since. And Walters achieved that, despite starting out having to do “Today” show segments in the early 1960s that saw her doing stunts like dressing up as a Playboy bunny.

But Jackie Jesko’s documentary goes beyond the obvious, just as Walters’ own interviews so often did. It’s clear-eyed about Walters’ transactional approach to arranging interviews, and about the discomforting allure “money, fame, and power,” in the words of her biographer Peter Gethers, held for her.

There’s even a clip of her...

Marvin Josephson, founder of ICM Partners, died Tuesday in New York. He was 95 years old.

A cause of death was not immediately available.

“We mourn the loss of Marvin Josephson, one of the founders of ICM, who was universally respected as an agent, a leader and a man,” ICM Partners said in a statement. “We send our heartfelt condolences to his family.”

Born on March 6, 1927 in Atlantic City, N.J., Josephson was raised by immigrant parents. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the twilight of World War II, Josephson returned to the United States to attend Cornell University and then night law school at New York University School of Law. Upon receiving his degree in 1962, Josephson started a job in the CBS legal department.

In 1955, Josephson began his own personal management company, drawing clients such as “Captain Kangaroo” producer and star Bob Keeshan. Josephson would convert his management company...

Marvin Josephson, who helped grow a small management company that could not afford a secretary into an international entertainment agency with multiple offices, died May 17 in New York. He was 95.

Josephson was born March 6, 1927 in Atlantic City, N.J. to immigrant parents. Upon graduation from Atlantic City High School, he entered the US Navy just before the end of World War II. After the Navy, he attended Cornell University, where he received a B.A. degree.

He went on to night law school at New York University School of Law and received his law degree in 1952. That same year, Josephson got a job in the CBS legal department. He left CBS to start his own company and was the only employee, since he could not afford a secretary.

The new company started April 1, 1955 as a personal management company. The first important client was Bob Keeshan, who produced and starred in “Captain Kangaroo,...

Jim Hartz, the veteran TV personality and reporter who co-hosted the Today show with Barbara Walters in the mid-1970s, has died. He was 82. According to Deadline, Hartz passed away on April 17 in Fairfax County, Virginia. His wife, Alexandra Dickson Hartz, confirmed the news, revealing that her husband had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Born on February 3, 1940, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hartz started his career as a reporter for Kotv in Tulsa in 1962 before being promoted to news director in 1964. At 24-years-old, he joined the NBC-owned Wnbc-tv in New York, becoming the youngest correspondent that NBC had ever hired. There, he served as anchor of the 6 Pm and 11 Pm nightly newscasts. In 1974, Hartz was promoted to the Today show, replacing Frank McGee, who died at 58. He would bring a low-key vibe to the show, which played off Walters’ more high-energy presenting style. During his two-year stint at Today,...

Jim Hartz, who hosted the Today show with Barbara Walters in the mid-1970s, died April 17 in Fairfax County, Va. He was 82 and passed from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to his wife, Alexandra Dickson Hartz.

Hartz was in mid-career when he joined Today, deploying a low-key style that was the low-key foil to the energy put out by Walters. He was 34 and succeeded Frank McGee, who died at 58. Hartz was a reporter for Wnbc covering local stories when he got the nod.

He joined Today and covered President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation, the end of the Vietnam War, and the American Bicentennial during his two years as a part of the morning show.

Hartz was born on Feb. 3, 1940, in Tulsa, Okla., the fifth child of Rev. Marvin Dillard Hartz, an Assembly of God minister, and Helen Elvira (Potter) Hartz.

After college, he was hired as a reporter for...

The birth of banjo great Earl Scruggs — born 96 years ago on January 6th, 1924, in the Cleveland County community of Flint Hill, North Carolina — predated the debut of the Grand Ole Opry by less than two years, but since then the musician has become synonymous with the Opry, as well as bluegrass and country music.

In late September 1961, Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt, and their band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, played a show at Greenville, South Carolina’s Memorial Auditorium, alongside fellow Opry stars Ray Price, Porter Wagoner, Minnie Pearl, Mother Maybelle Carter,...

Yes, him, again.

Matt Murdock. Daredevil. The subject of our last six get togethers.

But not to worry, we shan’t be talking about him again. Ever. Daredevil #612 was the last part of a four-part story called “The Death of Daredevil.” So that’s it, isn’t it? Daredevil is dead.

I mean, it’s not like Marvel would kill off a character and then bring him or her back to life, is it?

In Daredevil #609, the start of the four-part story, Matt was hit by a truck while saving a kid. I don’t know if it was a Mack truck or a semi with a hemi or even a hemi-demi-semi-quaver, but it was big. Big enough to send Matt to the hospital and to reevaluate his lot in life. Lots.

And Matt decided what he was going to do, if it was the last thing he did, was...