Veteran anchor Connie Chung has delivered a sharp rebuke of CBS News, accusing the network’s new corporate owners and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of dismantling the culture she helped build. Speaking on the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Chung said her former home “has crashed into crumbles” under “greedy owners” and said she and her husband, Maury Povich, no longer watch the network.
Chung linked the shift to the August merger that put CBS parent company Paramount in the hands of Skydance Media chief David Ellison, after an $8 billion deal that followed months of upheaval. Before regulators signed off, Paramount settled a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from Donald Trump over an edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, agreeing to send $16 million to his future presidential library, a move that alarmed First Amendment lawyers and some CBS staff.
“The paradigm has completely changed in news,” Chung told Torre, arguing that opinion programming has crowded out “good old-fashioned facts” and left viewers hunting for basic information. She contrasted the Ellison-Redstone era with the days of William Paley and Frank Stanton, when CBS, in her telling, treated the news division as an autonomous watchdog rather than a profit center. “Their greed has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble,” she said.
Chung reserved special criticism for Weiss, who arrived in October as CBS News’ first editor-in-chief after Paramount acquired her digital outlet The Free Press for $150 million. In its announcement, Paramount described Weiss as a “proven champion of independent, principled journalism” and said she would help make CBS “the most trusted name in news,” reporting directly to Ellison while continuing to run The Free Press.
Inside CBS, the hire has split the newsroom. Current employees quoted in one report called Weiss’s appointment “utterly depressing” and questioned bringing in a figure with no background in television news and a well-defined political profile at a time of looming budget cuts, even as others struck a wait-and-see tone. Weiss has moved quickly to stamp her vision on the schedule, including a December 13 prime-time town hall moderated by her and built around Erika Kirk, widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, in a program framed around grief, faith and politics.
Outside observers cast the Ellison–Weiss axis as part of a larger ideological play in which a billionaire family with close ties to Trump and strong pro-Israel politics extends its influence over a marquee news brand. Supporters argue that CBS needs a jolt to reconnect with audiences who distrust traditional media; critics like Chung see a legacy institution trading independence and scrutiny for proximity to power.
