Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Connie Chung has taken on the “greedy owners” of her old network amid its rightward shift in recent months.
Chung — on Thursday’s episode of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” — described CBS as a “whole different organization” from the time she worked there before calling out Shari Redstone, who sold her majority stake in parent company Paramount Global to David Ellison’s Skydance Media in a $8.4 billion deal over the summer.
“Their greed has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble, to crash into crumbles,” said Chung, the second woman ever to anchor a major U.S. nightly news program.
She proceeded to chuckle before name-dropping Bari Weiss, the conservative journalist who recently became CBS News’ new editor-in-chief.
“I don’t know what to call Bari Weiss, I just don’t know,” she said.
Moments earlier, Chung told Torre that she can’t watch CBS now, adding that the “paradigm has completely changed in news” and it distresses her that people “can’t find good old-fashioned facts” anymore.
CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
Chung joins a number of critics who have criticized CBS and its leadership in the months since Paramount agreed to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit against “60 Minutes.”
The lawsuit was widely seen as frivolous, with critics likening the settlement to the company kissing Trump’s ring. The move came just ahead of Paramount’s merger with Skydance, which required the administration’s approval.
“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe” in one of his monologues, remarks that gained renewed interest after CBS announced its decision to cancel his show, citing a “financial decision.”
Chung noted that late CBS owner William S. Paley once stressed the need for an autonomous news division that didn’t have to “worry about the bottom line” during his ownership.
She pointed to Frank Stanton’s time as CBS president, too, noting that the executive 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. We reporters are watchdogs of government. It’s our job to report information that is not fed to us,” she said.
