Matea Gold gets the scoop:

Late last night, as NBC's $1 million offer for the Paris Hilton interview became a mini media scandal, the heiress' family "frantically sought to secure a deal with ABC's Barbara Walters -- who then declined the exclusive."

After a "flurry of personal calls in the middle of the night," Walters and EP David Sloan decided to turn it down.

"The fact that both NBC and ABC appear to have backed away from interviewing Hilton underscores the risks of overreaching for publicity, as well as the television networks' discomfort with attention on the ways they seek to compensate subjects for exclusives," Gold writes. Read the rest...