Connie Chung

Graceful, reassuring, well-groomed TV newscaster with a beautiful speaking voice who, on June 1, 1993, on CBS, became the first woman to co-anchor a major network's national news broadcast since Barbara Walters was teamed with Harry Reasoner on ABC in 1976. The youngest of ten children born to Chinese immigrants (and the only one born in the US), Chung began as a cub reporter in the Washington DC area. Signed on by CBS in 1971 she eventually began covering stories for the "CBS Evening News" before becoming a co-anchor for network affiliate KNXT in Los Angeles in 1976. She also became a substitute anchor for the national evening news and did many weekend and morning broadcasts.

Won over to NBC in 1983, Chung performed similar duties on the "NBC Nightly News" and its parallel daytime broadcasts. She also hosted a number of "NBC News Reports on America," but unfortunately, such installments as "Life in the Fat Lane," "Stressed to Kill" and "Everybody's Doing It" suggested to some that she was essentially a reporter of "soft" news: one TV wag, blithely forgetting her years of reporting, dubbed her "Connie Funn." Moving back to CBS in 1989, Chung became the network's regular anchor for the Sunday edition of the "CBS Evening News" and often substituted during the week for Dan Rather. She also hosted several moderately successful primetime news magazine shows ("Saturday Night with Connie Chung," "Face to Face with Connie Chung") which featured her covering one of the show's stories herself or conducting an interview with some newsworthy figure. Despite the ups and downs of her career, Chung has always combined a solid professionalism and smooth delivery with a natural, relaxed charm, earning her perenially high marks in media surveys. It was precisely this brand of likability which led CBS (known around the newsroom as the "Connie Broadcasting Service") to team her with the veteran Rather in an attempt to boost the evening newscast's ratings from second place to the top spot. The result was ultimately unsuccessful and Chung was dropped (somewhat unceremoniously in the eyes of many) from the broadcast, but she has certainly made her mark, perhaps most controversially when she House speaker Newt Gingrich's mother to state that her son considered First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton a "bitch." Married to TV talk show host Maury Povich.