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James Earl Carter Jr. is an American retired politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975 and as a Georgia state senator from 1963 to 1967.

The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Founded in 1828, it was predominantly built by Martin Van Buren, who assembled politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party. Its main political rival has been the Republican Party since the 1850s, with both parties being big tents of competing and often opposing viewpoints. Modern American liberalism — a variant of social liberalism — is the party's majority ideology. The party also has notable centrist, social democratic, and left-libertarian factions.

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. was an American politician who served as the 38th president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. He was the only president never to have been elected to the office of president or vice president as well as the only president to date from Michigan. He previously served as the leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives, and was appointed to be the 40th vice president in 1973. When President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford succeeded to the presidency, but was defeated for election to a full term in 1976.

The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. It has been the main political rival of the Democratic Party since the mid-1850s. Like them, the Republican Party is a big tent of competing and often opposing ideologies. Presently, the Republican Party contains prominent conservative, centrist, populist, and right-libertarian factions.

The 1976 United States presidential election was the 48th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford from Michigan by a narrow victory of 297 electoral college votes to Ford's 240. This is the most recent presidential election, and the first since 1920, in which both major-party candidates for vice-president would go on to become the presidential nominees for their parties in later elections. As of 2023, this is also the earliest presidential election where at least one of the candidates is still living.

Barbara Jill Walters was an American broadcast journalist and television personality. Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, she appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NATAS in 2000 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.

The Los Angeles Times, abbreviated as LA Times, is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the Los Angeles suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States. The publication has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. It is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by the Times Mirror Company. The newspaper's coverage has evolved more recently away from U.S. and international headlines and toward emphasizing California and especially Southern California stories.