During an interview on Sunday's edition of the new Fox News Channel program Media Buzz, Barbara Walters told host Howard Kurtz that The View -- the weekday program she created for ABC on August 11, 1997, and is retiring from next summer -- is neither political nor news-oriented since it was intended to be “entertaining and upbeat.”

“The View is not Meet the Press,” Walters said even though she admitted that “a lot of people do get their news” from the show, which features a discussion among five female co-hosts on a wide variety of topics. However, she noted that there was no panel on what Kurtz called “the national melodrama over the federal shutdown” because, the 84-year-old newscaster said, “I didn't think that was entertaining or upbeat.”