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Things Aren't Looking Rosie Between O'Donnell, Walters

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By WALT BELCHER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 21, 2008

TAMPA - The media help keep Rosie O'Donnell's feuds alive.

O'Donnell and Barbara Walters are trading shots this week. O'Donnell fired off last night on Conan O'Brien's late night talkie with some sarcastic faint praise for Walters' "The View."

She said she didn't want to "dump on the show in order to benefit my own career." She sarcastically said she "never had a career before that show."

After giving mocking praise to the show, she flashed Conan a smile that he said was the scariest thing he had seen since Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."

This was after Walters indicated O'Donnell was saying bad things about "The View" just to create publicity for O'Donnell's live variety show on NBC next week.

O'Donnell versus Barbara Walters.

O'Donnell versus Donald Trump.

Old news? Maybe. But it came back to life this week during an NBC teleconference to promote "Rosie Live!" - a musical variety show airing Wednesday night.

To be fair, O'Donnell didn't bring up "The View" or Trump during the teleconference. The media did. She could, though, have deferred comment.

The media kept asking her about that "View" experience where she got into political arguments with the resident conservative co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck. There were questions about her sparring with Trump, basically from a distance, through the media.

She left "The View" last year, and there appear to be bitter feelings.

"After I left the show I couldn't watch it because, you know, I had so many kind of mixed emotions and it would just be kind of almost like post-traumatic stress disorder," she said during teleconference.

"Every time I would turn it on, I would have mild panic and have to turn it off," she said. "So, truly, I haven't really watched it.

"When I took the job on 'The View,' I knew it was to express my views politically, and I felt that they weren't being expressed, the views that I held and that I felt millions of mothers - and I still feel - and fathers hold across the nation.

"It was a conversation, I think, that needed to be had, and it started the ball rolling in many ways for that show to be taken seriously as a political show," she said.

"I had to fight very long and hard at the beginning of that program to get them to address politics in any capacity. You know, the war would be happening, and we'd lose 20 troops in one day, and they'd want to talk about lipstick shades.

"I'm not proud of the arguing or of the fighting, and I wasn't happy with the fact that I didn't have the control of the show," she said. "I had trouble with and some of the ways that it went down was not, you know, the way I would have done it. But it's not my program."

She added that Walters wanted everyone to think that the cast got along just fine off camera, but that wasn't the case.

Walters opened "The View" on Thursday by complaining about "some people who have done this show" who criticize it after leaving. Walters never mentioned O'Donnell by name, but it was clear she was talking her.

Walters said some former hosts feel the need "to dump on it, maybe for their own publicity.

"That not only hurts me, but I resent it."

During the teleconference, someone asked O'Donnell whether she would have Trump as a guest if her special becomes a series. She laughed and said, "They say 'never say never,' but in this case I can. Never."

Reporter Walt Belcher can be reached at (813 259-7654 or wbelcher@tampatrib.com.

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