As Bari Weiss revamps CBS News, one television journalist veteran is mourning the newsroom as she knew it.
CBS News alum Connie Chung, whose history with the network goes back to 1971 when she was a DC correspondent, recently admitted that the regime change amid the $8.4 billion Paramount Skydance merger “distresses me so terribly.”
“CBS is a whole different organization than I had worked for,” she explained on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. “CBS has now been taken over, thanks to greedy owners, Shari Redstone partnering with David Ellison, Larry Ellison‘s son.”
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Chung continued, “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.”
Following his Paramount takeover in August, David Ellison named Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News, in addition to purchasing The Free Press, her right-leaning commentary site. Given Weiss’ predominantly op-ed experience, many have questioned her qualifications to oversee a balanced and unbiased news organization of this size.
When asked how it feels for herself and husband Maury Povich to watch CBS News these days, following her 1989-’95 tenure, Chung responded, “We don’t.
“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 said. “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 decried the “complete dismantling of that kind of social responsibility, that we are watchdogs. It’s our job to report information that is not fed to us.”
After starting as a DC correspondent for CBS Evening News in 1971, Chung returned in ’89 to anchor the program and to host Saturday Night with Connie Chung, as well as Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. In 1993, she became the second woman (after ABC’s Barbara Walters in ’76) to co-anchor a major network’s weekday newscast.