Connie Chung

Connie Chung
Connie Chung was once at the top of the broadcast journalism world, yet all good things must come to an end. Chung co-anchored the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. As well as hosting her own program, Face to Face. Connie Chung had a glorious rise and a dramatic fall. Chung’s career started as an assignment editor and on-the-air-reporter at a local Washington, D.C. television station WTTG. In 1971, when the Federal Communications Commission began pressuring television networks to hire more minorities and women, Chung then applied at CBS’s Washington bureau.
Chung covered George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1971 and accompanied Richard Nixon on trips to the Middle East and the Soviet Union in 1972. In 1976, she became a news anchor for KNXT, the local CBS television station in Los Angeles. There, her salary went from about $27,000 a year to an estimated $600,000, making Connie Chung one of the country’s highest-paid local news anchors in 1983. She received many honors, including an award for best television reporting from the Los Angeles Press Club in 1977 and Local Emmys in 1978 and 1980. In 1984, Chung was asked to anchor NBC News at Sunrise. Eager to return to reporting national politics, she did not let this opportunity pass her by. In November 1983 Chung’s status
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as a rising network star was reaffirmed, she made the first of many appearances on the Today show as a substitute for anchorwoman Jane Pauley. Connie Chung announced in March 1989 that she would rejoin CBS after her NBC contract expired in May. She was to anchor a revamped West 57th Street and the CBS Sunday Night News. This agreement was worth nearly $1.5 million a year.
On September 23, 1989, Saturday Night with Connie Chung made its CBS debut. The show, however, was not well received by critics. Chung was criticized for the show’s shifts from documentation to entertainment- it was misleading for viewers. In 1993, to raise the Evening News ratings, CBS paired...