The News Anchor America Needed

EPISODE 170: A visit from Connie Chung.

Back in my day, as a kid in the early ‘90s, there was no internet, no cell phones, no social media, and so “watching the news” meant pressing a button to turn on the television after dinner.

At which point, almost inevitably, Connie Chung crackled into view.

Today, Connie is a tireless 78 years old. And this week, at this very moment in American political history, there are few people I wanted to talk to more.

Connie wasn’t only the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News, with Dan Rather, the man who’d succeeded Walter Cronkite, who’d hired Connie as a correspondent. (“Uncle Walter,” she called him.) Connie was also the first-ever Asian network news anchor; the reporter responsible for the first federal prosecution of a Civil Rights-era murder case; and, as you’ll see in this episode, simply one of the toughest TV interviewers of all time.

I’d also been thinking about Connie ever since her husband — daytime-television icon Maury Povich — casually mentioned her memoirs to us a year ago:

You will not be surprised to learn, by the way, that Connie Chung and Maury Povich — this paragon of journalism and this paragon of the alleged opposite — are, in fact, opposites themselves.

But it’s maybe not how you’d expect.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Proudly,

Pablo