When Lisa Ling returned to The View as a guest co-host on September 24, 2026, she was stepping back into a place that helped shape the beginning of one of the most distinctive careers in American journalism. Ling was only 26 when she joined The View in 1999, taking a seat alongside Barbara Walters, Meredith Vieira, Star Jones and Joy Behar. She left the program in 2002, choosing to return to the kind of reporting and storytelling that had originally drawn her to journalism. In the years that followed, she would travel across the country and around the world, telling stories about people and communities that many viewers rarely had an opportunity to encounter firsthand. Her return to the Hot Topics table during The View’s 30th season was therefore more than a nostalgic television moment. It offered an opportunity to look at the remarkable career that unfolded after she left—and at what more than two decades of interviewing people from dramatically different backgrounds have taught Ling about curiosity, empathy, listening and human connection. Those lessons may be even more relevant now than when her career began.
Returning to The View With a Different Perspective
Twenty-four years after leaving the permanent panel, Ling returned to The View with decades of additional reporting and life experience behind her. The program itself has changed considerably. During her original tenure, Ling was one of the younger voices at a table built around Barbara Walters’ then-unusual idea of bringing women from different generations and backgrounds together to discuss the day’s issues. Ling has recalled wanting the show to tackle more politics during those early years—something that would eventually become a major part of The View’s identity. But what made her September return particularly interesting wasn’t simply seeing a former co-host back at the table. It was hearing someone revisit an important early chapter of her life after everything that came afterward. Following the appearance, Ling joined Sara Haines and executive producer Brian Teta for The View: Behind the Table. Their conversation moved beyond television and into much more personal territory, including family, grief, aging parents and the lasting influence of Barbara Walters. For Ling, Walters wasn’t simply a famous journalist sitting at the other end of the table. She was an example of what an extraordinary career in journalism could look like—and someone who offered advice that Ling would understand differently as she grew older.
What Barbara Walters Taught Lisa Ling About More Than Journalism
Ling has spoken warmly about the influence Walters had on her career, but one of the most revealing memories from her recent conversation wasn’t about interviewing technique or television. It was about life. During Ling’s years on The View, Walters cautioned her about becoming so consumed by her career that she neglected her personal life. At the time, Ling was young, ambitious and intensely focused on reporting and traveling. More than two decades later, as a wife and mother navigating the responsibilities that come with children, family and aging parents, that advice carries a different weight. There’s something fitting about that lesson coming from Barbara Walters. Ling’s own career would eventually become defined by an ability to look beyond people’s titles, labels and public identities and discover the more complicated human stories underneath them. An executive isn’t only an executive. A journalist isn’t only a journalist. An employee isn’t only an employee. Everyone arrives at a conversation carrying experiences the other person may know nothing about. That understanding would become increasingly important as Ling moved away from the daily television conversation of The View and deeper into long-form journalism.
From The View to the Stories Most People Never Hear
Leaving a nationally televised program like The View might have seemed like an unusual career move. For Ling, it opened the door to the work that would come to define her. She became a correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, worked with National Geographic, hosted Our America with Lisa Ling and spent nine seasons exploring complex and frequently misunderstood subjects on CNN’s This Is Life with Lisa Ling. More recently, Take Out with Lisa Ling used food as an entry point into the largely untold history and cultural experiences of Asian Americans. Across those projects, Ling has reported on subjects ranging from addiction and incarceration to religion, sexuality, mental health, cultural identity and communities that are frequently discussed without being genuinely understood. The subjects may change, but the approach has remained remarkably consistent: go there, meet people, ask questions and listen long enough to discover what the story looks like from inside someone else’s life. That last part is important. Modern media makes it extraordinarily easy to know about people without ever really knowing them. We encounter headlines, posts, clips and opinions about entire groups of people, often compressed into a few seconds of attention. Ling’s journalism has frequently moved in the opposite direction. Instead of observing people from a distance, she gets closer. And proximity has a way of complicating assumptions.
Curiosity May Be More Valuable Than Certainty
One of the most compelling lessons running through Lisa Ling’s career is that understanding often begins with curiosity rather than certainty. When someone believes something we don’t understand, behaves in a way we wouldn’t or lives in circumstances completely outside our experience, the easiest response is often judgment. The more difficult response is a question: Why? Why does this person see the world this way? What happened before we arrived? What pressures or experiences shaped this decision? What might we discover if we listen before deciding what we think? Curiosity doesn’t require agreement. Empathy doesn’t require endorsement. Both simply require acknowledging that another person’s story may be more complicated than it first appears. For a journalist, that willingness to remain curious can uncover a better story. For organizations, it can create better leaders. A manager trying to understand why employees are resisting change, an executive attempting to rebuild trust or a company trying to understand its customers faces a variation of the same challenge Ling has encountered throughout her reporting career: can you become curious enough about someone else’s perspective to understand it before responding to it? That makes listening more than a communication skill. It makes listening a leadership skill.
Watch: Lisa Ling Returns to The View
Ling’s September 24 guest-co-hosting appearance brings her career full circle, returning her to the table where millions of viewers first came to know her with more than two additional decades of reporting, interviewing and documentary storytelling behind her.
Lisa Ling Returns To Guest Co-Host | The View
Human Connection in an Increasingly Digital World
The world Lisa Ling returned to on The View is very different from the one she left in 2002. Social media has transformed public conversation. Smartphones have changed how people interact with the world around them. Remote and hybrid work have changed relationships between colleagues. Algorithms increasingly determine what information people encounter. And artificial intelligence can now generate language, images, audio and video that can imitate forms of human communication with remarkable sophistication. We have more ways to communicate than ever before. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting better at understanding one another.
That tension is at the heart of one of Ling’s current keynote presentations, “Human Connection in a Digital World.” Drawing from her experiences as a journalist and interviewer, Ling explores interpersonal communication at a time when more and more of our lives are being mediated through screens and digital platforms. Her perspective is particularly interesting because her career has been built on almost the opposite experience: being physically present with people, asking questions, noticing reactions, listening to stories and allowing conversations to go somewhere unexpected.
Technology can make communication faster and more efficient. AI can summarize information, generate text and analyze enormous amounts of data. But meaningful human communication contains things that are much harder to automate: context, emotion, trust, vulnerability, body language, shared experience and the willingness to remain present when a conversation becomes difficult. Those aren’t merely journalistic skills. They are increasingly important workplace skills.
What Lisa Ling’s Career Teaches Us About Human Connection
After decades of interviewing people from extraordinarily different backgrounds, several ideas consistently emerge from Ling’s body of work. Curiosity can open doors that assumptions close. Listening gives people an opportunity to reveal something more complicated than the story we expected to hear. Getting closer to people can challenge stereotypes that are easy to maintain from a distance. Empathy allows us to understand another perspective without requiring us to share it. And storytelling can transform abstract issues into something human.
Why Human Connection Matters to Business Leaders
The relevance of these ideas extends well beyond journalism. Businesses are navigating extraordinary technological change. AI is reshaping workflows and jobs. Teams may work together every day without occupying the same office—or even the same country. Customers interact with automated systems before they ever encounter another person. Employees can exchange hundreds of digital messages while having remarkably few meaningful conversations. For leaders, the challenge isn’t to resist those technologies. It’s to make sure greater efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of understanding. Employees still want to feel heard. Customers still want to feel understood. Teams still depend on trust. Organizational change still creates uncertainty. Conflict still requires people to consider perspectives other than their own. And leadership still requires knowing when to stop talking and listen. That’s one reason Ling’s journalism translates so naturally to the keynote stage. She isn’t approaching human connection as an abstract management theory. She has spent much of her professional life practicing it under difficult circumstances—with strangers, in unfamiliar environments and across enormous cultural, ideological and social differences.
Watch: Lisa Ling Reflects on The View, Barbara Walters and Life Beyond the Table
Ling’s conversation following her return offers a more personal counterpart to her guest-co-hosting appearance. Her reflections on Barbara Walters, family, grief and the different stages of life reveal another dimension of a journalist audiences often know primarily through her reporting.
What Barack Obama Told Lisa Ling About Leaving ‘The View’
Lisa Ling Brings Those Stories to the Keynote Stage
As a keynote speaker, Lisa Ling brings audiences something that can’t easily be separated from her journalism: the perspective that comes from decades spent entering unfamiliar environments and listening to people whose experiences may be dramatically different from her own. Her presentations explore human connection, journalism, culture, wellness and the experiences that shape how people understand one another. For corporate, association, leadership and educational audiences, those subjects have become increasingly relevant as organizations wrestle with technological disruption and the changing ways people communicate. Her keynote “Human Connection in a Digital World” is especially timely. At a moment when organizations are understandably focused on what AI and other technologies can do, Ling brings attention back to something technology doesn’t make obsolete—the need to listen, understand, build trust and connect with other people. Her message isn’t that we should retreat from technology. It’s that we shouldn’t lose the human beings on the other side of it.
A Return to The View—and a Reminder to Keep Listening
Lisa Ling’s September return to The View brought her back to a television table she left as a young journalist 24 years ago. But what makes the moment interesting isn’t simply that she came back. It’s everything she did in between. She spent those years traveling, reporting, interviewing and listening—often introducing audiences to people and communities they might otherwise never encounter. Along the way, her career became an extended exploration of what happens when we’re willing to move beyond assumptions and become genuinely curious about someone else’s experience. Today, when technology gives us more ways than ever to communicate while sometimes making it easier to remain inside our own worlds, that lesson feels particularly relevant. Tools will continue to change. Media will continue to change. Artificial intelligence will continue to change how information is created and consumed. But one challenge remains stubbornly human: We still have to understand one another.
Book Lisa Ling for Your Next Event
Lisa Ling brings corporate, association, leadership and educational audiences a distinctive perspective shaped by decades of journalism, storytelling and conversations with people from across the cultural and social spectrum. For organizations exploring leadership, communication, empathy, culture or the importance of human connection in an increasingly digital world, Ling offers something particularly valuable: lessons drawn not simply from studying human behavior, but from a career spent listening to human stories. Book Lisa Ling through Speakers.com to learn more about her keynote programs, speaking fee and availability for your upcoming event.
