Connie Chung Critiques CBS News’ Ownership Amid Bari Weiss’s Ascendancy: “Truth Isn’t Valued Like Before”
As Bari Weiss takes the helm at CBS News, veteran journalist Connie Chung reflects on the dramatic changes in the newsroom she once knew.
Chung, who began her career at CBS News in 1971 as a Washington, D.C. correspondent, recently expressed her discontent regarding the shift in leadership following the $8.4 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance. “It distresses me so terribly,” she stated.
During an appearance on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, Chung elaborated on her feelings. “CBS is a whole different organization than I had worked for,” she remarked, attributing the transformation to “greedy owners,” notably Shari Redstone and David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison.
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Chung went on to criticize the current direction of CBS, saying, “Their greed has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble, to crash into crumbles, and they’ve hired this – I don’t know what to call Bari Weiss.”
In August, following the Paramount takeover, David Ellison appointed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News and acquired The Free Press, her commentary platform. Given Weiss’s background primarily in opinion journalism, many have raised concerns about her suitability to lead a large news organization tasked with providing balanced coverage.
Reflecting on the current state of CBS News, Chung said she and her husband, Maury Povich, no longer watch the network. “I mean, I can’t. The paradigm has completely changed in news, and we have so much opinion that the truth doesn’t hold value anymore,” she remarked. “What we end up doing, as consumers, is trying to find the truth. We can’t find good, old-fashioned facts, and it distresses me so terribly.”
Chung lamented what she sees as a “complete dismantling” of the media’s responsibility to serve as watchdogs. “It’s our job to report information that is not fed to us,” she asserted.
After beginning her career as a D.C. correspondent for CBS Evening News, Chung returned in 1989 as the program’s anchor and hosted Saturday Night with Connie Chung and Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. Notably, in 1993 she became the second woman, following ABC’s Barbara Walters in 1976, to co-anchor a weekday newscast at a major network.
