Barbara Walters Apologizes for Helping Aide to Assad of Syria In the months after her exclusive interview last year with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Barbara Walters tried to intercede to get a television position for a former aide of his, who Ms. Walters acknowledged helped arrange the interview. Ms. Walters, the longtime ABC News correspondent, issued a statement Tuesday apologizing for reaching out to contacts to seek an internship with CNN and admission at Columbia University for Sheherazad Jaafari, who had been a media adviser for Mr. Assad. Ms. Jaafari, 22, is the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. "I did offer to mention her to contacts at another media organization and in academia, though she didn't get a job or into school," Ms. Walters said in the statement. In retrospect, I realize that this created a conflict and I regret that. Her statement was included in an article published by The Telegraph in London, which cited a series of e-mails that outlined the connection between Ms. Walters and Ms. Jaafari. The e-mails were collected by a Syrian opposition group, which has intercepted confidential government communications of the Assad regime. As reported by The Telegraph, Ms. Walters and Ms. Jaafari stayed in friendly contact after the ABC interview with Mr. Assad in December. Ms. Walters turned down a request to intercede on behalf of Ms. Jaafari to secure a job at ABC News, saying that to do so would represent a conflict of interest. But Ms. Walters wrote in another e-mail that she had reached out to contacts at CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight" to have Ms. Jaafari hired as an intern, and to Richard Wald, a former ABC News colleague, to help her gain admission to Columbia. Mr. Wald, who is now a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, had once been the second-ranked executive at ABC News. The approach to the Piers Morgan show went both to Mr. Morgan and his producer, Jonathan Wald, who is Mr. Wald's son. In neither case was a position secured. In the case of CNN, no interview was ever granted or even considered, according to one person familiar with the series of events, who insisted on anonymity because Mr. Morgan's show had not authorized the person to speak. The absence of action took place even though the e-mails, according to The Telegraph article, included encomiums from Ms. Walters about "how terrific" Ms. Jaafari was and that she was brilliant, beautiful and a speaker of five languages. In her e-mail to CNN, Ms. Walters noted that she had first spoken up for Ms. Jaafari to Mr. Morgan when he was a guest on her daytime show, "The View," telling him, "I have a candidate for you." In the e-mail, she praised Ms. Jaafari as "a sensational young woman" who would make a "wonderful hire" for the program, if it had an available position. Ms. Jaafari's résumé was included. All these contacts came after the interview with Mr. Assad, which appeared on ABC on Dec. 7 and made news as Ms. Walters pressed Mr. Assad about the torturing and killing of his citizens, including children. He denied those accounts. The background of the meeting with the Syrian president, which Ms. Walters referred to in her statement as "hard hitting," was that she had chased an interview with Mr. Assad for some time and in the process cultivated a relationship with Ms. Jaafari's father, Bashar Jaafari, who is the United Nations ambassador from Syria. One longtime television news executive, who insisted on not being identified commenting on a rival news organization's employee, said the circumstance was far from unusual in a business where favors are often requested on behalf of contacts. "It's a little ugly to see how the sausage is made to land these big interviews," the executive said, adding that the favors appeared to be the result of an association established by the interview, not a quid pro quo for it. Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.