Longtime CBS News journalist Connie Chung criticized her former employer in an interview that aired Thursday, suggesting "greedy" ownership has caused the Tiffany Network to "crash into crumbles."
Chung worked as a correspondent for "CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite in the early 1970s before leaving to work in local news. She returned to CBS in 1989 and became the first Asian American to be a network anchor when she started co-anchoring "CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather in 1993. Chung joined Pablo Torre’s "Finds Out" podcast and was asked what it was like to watch CBS under new CEO David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
"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," Chung said.
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"We can’t find good, old-fashioned facts, and it distresses me so terribly," she continued. "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."
Paramount's former controlling shareholder Shari Redstone, who controlled more than three-quarters of Paramount’s Class A voting shares, exited the company this year after she successfully pushed for a merger with Skydance Media.
The newly formed Paramount Skydance Corp. is led by Ellison, who handpicked Bari Weiss to oversee CBS News.
"They’ve hired this — I don’t know what to call Bari Weiss — I just don’t know," Chung said.
Chung’s husband, Maury Povich, chimed in that the recent "60 Minutes" interview with President Donald Trump had been "decent."
Weiss, who quit The New York Times in 2020 after detailing bullying by her colleagues, launched the "Common Sense" newsletter in 2021 before rebranding it as The Free Press and expanding it into a full-fledged media company in 2022. After taking over Paramount, Ellison quickly purchased The Free Press and tasked Weiss with shaping editorial priorities across CBS News.
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Torre accused current CBS News management of "cosplaying" actual journalists.
"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," Chung said.
CBS News did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital’s Cortney O’Brien contributed to this report.
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