Barbara Walters has promised to retire. But then so did that lip-licking lizard, Larry King. You can’t take them at their word.

In my journalism-school days one looked up to the legendary, late Oriana Fallaci. These days, it’s mediocrities like Walters and colorectal crusader Katie Couric who’re considered cutting-edge clever. And they’ve sired a new crop of talking coifs.

Although they’re walking clichés—and there’s little they can say that’ll edify or enlighten—the likes of Brook Baldwin and Erin Burnett of CNN are regularly invited to deliver commencement addresses to university graduates! “Remember, it’s not about you,” Baldwin lectured students at her journalism and communications school alma mater. Yet journalistic evenhandedness regularly tips into self-serving advocacy under the direction of this feminist front-woman. “As a woman, I get frustrated,” Baldwin protested, as she browbeat a British reporter for daring to criticize Kate Middleton’s barely-there underwear.

Coming as she did from a background in “women’s interest stories,” it was only natural for Walters to bring the same one-dimensional perspective to “The View,” a roundtable dominated by women and aimed at the same demographic. “The View” was “charitably” punctured by the occasional “Guy Day Friday.” So successful was Barbara’s formula, that it has been copied by Fox News (where, with exceptions like Gerri Willis, Elizabeth MacDonald, Melissa Francis and Kennedy of the Business channel—the babes are not much better). “Outnumbered” (but not outfoxed) is “The View,” but with a better view of legs and cleavage. Views voiced by the self-congratulatory cyphers in short skirts on the GOP network, however, are just as formulaic as Barbara’s Democrat-friendly debates.

Another of Barbara’s brainchildren was the much anticipated, annual “Most Fascinating People List,” for which she redefined the concept of “fascinating.” Yes, Walters has been a cog in a coarsening culture. Some of her past picks for “The Most Fascinating List” included Paris Hilton, KimYe (Kim Kardashian and Kanye West), and twerker Miley Cyrus.

All Walters’ interviews make the flesh crawl. Paris Hilton made a porn debut, in which she made love to the camera (i.e. herself). Walters’ syrupy “journalism” transformed the narcissistic specter into a PG-rated tale of innocence betrayed. Well of course: Paris was led astray by a man.

And the broadcaster’s empathic posturing concealed a good deal of cattiness, even cruelty. Her idea of getting to the guts of a story: Bring a supremely vulnerable celebrity to tears. Wicked Walters once prefaced an interview with singer Celine Dion by pronouncing, “You are not beautiful.” She then paused to watch, gleefully, as tears welled in Dion’s beautiful eyes. Now that’s what I call a scoop!

The one person to rival Barbara’s bitchiness is sly Katie Couric. She interviewed Hillary Clinton while drunk with love for Obama. Couric’s below-the-belt barbs made Hillary appear elevated by comparison. The former “First Housewife” was courteous where Katie was unkind. “Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?” Couric inquired. “Only with some boys,” Clinton replied, laughing. Couric makes Clinton seem quick and classy.

Years back, Walters was granted an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. To Walters, complexity has always been a cuss word. Her approach was to stick to the inane and the mundane, while lobbing an occasional misguided missile. Out-of-the-blue—and true to her sensation-driven style—Walters asked the former KGB operative if he’d ever killed anyone. Putin’s mouth said no; his eyes seemed to be saying, “I feel a strong urge rising.”

Contrast the typical Walters tête-à-tête with the fusillade of irreverent questions and scalding ripostes Fallaci fired on Muammar Qaddafi in 1979. As the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot tells it, at one point, the colonel complains that she must not have read his manifesto, the “Green Book.” “Her answer is pure Fallaci, and very satisfying: ‘On the contrary, I read it. It doesn’t take very long, you know, 15 minutes at the most. It’s so small. My powder compact is bigger than your little ‘Green Book.'”

Good newsmen are a dying breed. Good newswomen are mostly dead already. (For reasons not mysterious, mainstream mediocrities are doing their utmost to marginalize sleuths like Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, and Laura Poitras, the documentarian who helped Edward Snowden expose the National Security Agency.) By the time she died, the brilliant and brave Oriana Fallaci had long since been buried professionally by the likes of Barbara Walters. For her unabashed contempt of Islam, Fallaci was forced to flee her native Italy. She came to America, where, needless to say, she never made it onto Barbara’s List.

A dictator known as Barack Hussein Obama has a devotee known as “Obama Girl.” In better days, Bashar Hafez al-Assad, another tyrant, had his own babe to do his bidding. “Obama Girl,” Amber Lee Ettinger, is the toast of the town; Bashar’s babe, Sheherazad el Jaafari, is being chased out of town.

The 22-year-old el Jaafari, the daughter of Syria’s UN ambassador, was admitted to Columbia University, in the City of New York, on the recommendation of a veteran of American broadcasting. Haya Dweidary, another Syrian student at Columbia, wants el Jaafari expelled from the University. Evincing the sort of reasoning we’ve come to expect from our Ivy League students, Dweidary calls el Jaafari “horrible and supporting the [Syrian] regime.” Dweidary further alleges that el Jaafari is a close associate of Assad and was involved in human-rights violations in Syria. But, in the main, Dweidary’s case against el Jaafari rests on envy, directed at “privileged people getting access to everything.”

Syrian squabbles imported; that’s cosmopolitan diversity (or the “melting pot”) at work.

Wikipedia credits “Obama Girl” with an entry, describing her as one who “rose to fame … in her Internet video ‘I Got a Crush… on Obama,’ in which she expressed her admiration of then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama.” Fame followed in quick succession. “The video led to numerous sketch comedy appearances and interviews on Saturday Night Live, Geraldo at Large, The O’Reilly Factor, and Hannity.”

Once a Hooters Miss Manhattan and a Miss Howard [Stern] TV, “Obama Girl” (AKA Ettinger) is particularly loved on “Huckabee,” the Fox News TV show of the former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (whom Phyllis Schlafly, conservatism’s “first lady,” accused of “destroying the conservative movement in Arkansas”).

Although entire news segments have been devoted to “Obama Girl’s” 2012 dilemma, no intrepid reporter has dared ask Ettinger to denounce the atrocities her dictator of choice has committed since the days she shook her behind for him on YouTube.

The president is a serial killer. The Surveillance State has metastasized under Barack Obama, whose growing fleet of armed Predators and Reapers—operated by both the CIA and the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command—each has its own Kill List, overseen personally by the president. As I write, Obama is likely pouring over pictures of Yemeni teenagers (“terrorists”), deciding who’ll live and whose time is up. Couple his kill-list venture and his leadership role in the leveling of Libya—and Obama is up there with the “best” of dictators.

On the support-for-statism scale, “Obama Girl” got to first base with Obama, and beyond.

Assad’s opportunistic sidekick, on the other hand, described her time at his side as “a challenging experience” that was “good for [her] CV. That’s all I care about now.”

Pray tell, to what end did Obama’s famous floozy put on a T & A show for her man? I hazard that it was with the express purpose of capturing the attentions of America’s media cartel, and making the most of those 15 minutes of fame.

Assisting Assad’s sidekick was Barbara Walters, that icon of American journalism (the “veteran broadcaster”). Walters is even cattier than the never-clever Katie Couric. All Walters’ interviews make the flesh crawl. Her idea of getting to the guts of a story: Bring a supremely vulnerable celebrity to tears. (The wicked Walters once prefaced an interview with Celine Dion by pronouncing, “You are not beautiful.” She then watched gleefully as tears welled in Dion’s beautiful eyes.)

Walters has since expressed “regret” (pronounced “wegwet”) for pulling strings to get the suspect Syrian admitted into Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs (SIPA).

Befitting its gossipy impetus, The Daily Beast broke this non-story. Al Arabiya and CNN’s John King amplified it. CNN, like the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based television news channel, is vested in toppling Assad. CNN reporters and their bosses are, inexplicably, excited by America’s angels-and-demons foreign policy production, starring the prototypical evil dictator who is killing his noble people. A happy ending in such febrile minds would see the US ride to the rescue.

The Sunni television station wants Assad gone for reasons more intelligent. Al Arabiya shares its theological and geopolitical vision with Al Jazeera, yet another television enterprise headquartered in Doha, and owned by the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar has adopted the regime-change policy of Saudi Arabia (in particular), the Sunni-dominated Arab League (in general), John McCain’s, Sean Hannity’s, and as many US liberals.

You see, as an Alawite, Al-Assad belongs to the opposing, Shia strand of Islam.

The question is, however, why are we Americans rooting for the Sunnis of the region? And the answer: America doesn’t know Shia from Shinola.

As to Bashar’s Babe: Is she so much more reprehensible than “Obama Girl,” who has worked her bootie off for America’s killer drone?