Trailblazing CBS Anchor Connie Chung Despairs Over Watching Network 'Crash Into Crumbles'
Sportswriter and podcaster Pablo Torre spoke to veteran news anchor Connie Chung on the most recent episode of his show, Pablo Torre Finds Out. Torre asked Chung to weigh in on the new ownership and leadership at CBS, where she co-anchored CBS Evening News. “What’s it like to watch CBS right now?” Torre asked.
Chung replied, “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. And what we end up doing is we, as consumers, trying to find the truth—we can’t find good old-fashioned facts. And it distresses me so terribly.” “CBS is a whole different organization than I had worked for. CBS has now been taken over, thanks to greedy owners, Shari Redstone partnering with David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. And their greed has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble, to crash into crumbles. I don’t know what to call Bari Weiss. I don’t even know. I just don’t know.
“Yeah, but she’s—you know, we’ll see,” interjected Chung’s husband, Maury Povich. “It’s not a big “we’ll see” as if she could possibly restore—” Chung continued. “She was there the other day when Trump goes on 60 Minutes. I thought it was a decent interview. It was okay,” Povich added. Torre jumped in, “You’re talking about Nora O’Donnell’s interview. Yes. Well, part of my concern, by the way—and I find it very, if I were you, I’d find it very difficult to watch the administration of CBS News wear the costume of CBS News, getting to cosplay, to pretend that nothing is different, even though the very premise of their acquisition of the network was, in fact, at the discretion and blessing of the president, who was the interview subject in that video that we were describing.” Chung agreed, “That’s right.”
Torre added, “And so just the very basic premise of that feels very hard to stomach if you care about anything resembling adversarial journalism.” Chung added, “If you care about serious news. When I worked at CBS, it was owned by William Paley, and he actually made it a point of allowing the news division to be autonomous and not have to worry about the bottom line. He had a president by the name of Frank Stanton who went before Congress time and time again to defend the Fourth Estate. Now we have a 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.”
more... https://www.mediaite.com/media/podcasts/trailblazing-cbs-anchor-connie-chung-despairs-over-watching-network-crash-into-crumbles/
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