Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Connie Chung said the impending sale of Paramount and “60 Minutes” skirmish with Donald Trump represent “the end of CBS News” as she knew it, blaming Shari Redstone and the Ellisons for the demise of “unbiased, fact-based journalism.”
“CBS was always a standalone network,” Chung said in a CNN interview with Brianna Keilar on Saturday. “The news division was autonomous. It was always unencumbered by pressures from politicians – including presidents – and unencumbered by bean-counters. But now I can see that the days [of] honest, unbiased, fact-based journalism is being tainted.
Chung placed the blame squarely on Redstone, chair of Paramount Global, and “Larry Ellison, and his son David,” who “seem to only know greed, avarice. I worry about the CBS I used to know.”
Chung rose to national prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming one of the first Asian American women to anchor a major U.S. network newscast. At different points she worked for all of the “Big Three” networks — CBS, NBC, and ABC — and later at CNN.
“Ellison’s lawyers told CBS that they would wipe away diversity,” Chung said. “I would never have had a glorious career … had it not been for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which women and minorities were finally seen as equal.”
Watch the entire interview in the video clip above.
