Media integrity?

Barbara Walters tried to get Assad aide CNN job, spot at Columbia University

By CHUCK BENNETT

Just weeks after TV doyenne Barbara Walters landed an exclusive interview with brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she tried to get his comely young press aide a job at CNN and a spot at Columbia University, newly released e-mails show.

A humbled Walters apologized yesterday after a Syrian opposition group exposed the cozy — and questionable — e-mails she exchanged with Sheherazad Jaafari, the glamorous, 22-year-old former Assad adviser, who helped arrange the big “get” with the Middle East strongman last December.

The “View” founder had called Jaafari “dear girl” and signed her e-mails “Hugs, Barbara” while Jafaari referred to the 82-year-old TV veteran as her “adopted mother.”

A few weeks after the airing of the Damascus interview, in which Assad brazenly denied ordering the bloody crackdown that has cost 9,000 lives, Walters had an intimate lunch with Jaafari at the Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, which first obtained the e-mails.

During lunch, Jaafari, the daughter of Bashar Jaafari, the Syrian ambassador to the UN, asked for a job at ABC News.

Sheherazad Jaafari had assured Assad, whom she called “the Dude,” that the “American psyche can be easily manipulated,” the e-mails show,

But Assad felt humiliated by Walters’ questions about the violence and had Jaafari sacked, sources told The Post.

“In the aftermath, Ms. Jaafari returned to the US and contacted me looking for a job,” Walters said in a statement.

“I told her that was a serious conflict of interest and that we would not hire her. I did offer to mention her to contacts at another media organization and in academia,” Walters said, “though she didn’t get a job or into school.”

To that end, Walters had reached out Jonathan Wald, a producer for CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” telling Jaafari, “I wrote to Piers Morgan and his producer to say how terrific you are and attached your resume.”

“CNN received a letter, however, we never spoke to the woman nor hired her,” a company spokeswoman said.

Walters had also contacted Wald’s father, Richard, the former chief of ABC News and lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The elder Wald, who gives talks on ethics in journalism, replied he would have the admissions “give her special attention,” according to the e-mails.

“We get many similar requests,” Wald told The Post. “I would forward any from a prominent journalist.”

Walters, however, was more contrite. “In retrospect, I realize that this created a conflict and I regret that,” she said.