How She Got There: Connie Chung, TV News Reporter & Anchorwoman

Shortly after meeting journalist Connie Chung and her husband, television host Maury Povich, I was sitting at home brainstorming interesting career women to reach out to for this new How She Got There series…at which point I realized that just hours ago, I’d been chatting with a woman whose career has landed her on more hours of television than I’ve probably ever watched.  

Lucky for me, Chung agreed to get back on the phone and open up about her career path, starting with her run as a nearly-flunking University of Maryland biology major busy discovering makeup and beer. Now a three-time Emmy-award winning journalist who has interviewed a handful of U.S. presidents, Chung shares her thoughts on college, journalism, women in the workplace—and about how she went from switching majors more times than she can count to being the country’s second major female co-anchor and covering Watergate from the White House.

Name: Connie Chung

Age: 64

Job Title and Description: Retired Television News Reporter/Anchorwoman

• Reporter at WTTG-TV Metromedia (now Fox)
• National correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
• Anchor at the CBS-owned station KNXT-TV (now KCBS)
• Correspondent and anchor at NBC News 
• Anchor and correspondent of Saturday Night with Connie Chung and later, co-anchor of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and Connie Chung and anchor and correspondent on Eye to Eye with Connie Chung” as well as a CBS News floor reporter
• Harvard fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
• Co-anchor and correspondent on ABC’s 20/20
• Anchor on CNN’s Connie Chung Tonight
• Co-host of NBC’s Weekends with Maury and Connie

College/major: University of Maryland, College Park; Journalism

Her Campus: Most of us who’ve turned on a television in the last few decades have an idea of who you are, but rewinding a bit, I’d love to hear more about how and why you got to be who you are—maybe starting with your time at the University of Maryland, what you were like there and how it shaped you.

CC: I went to the University of Maryland at a time in the ‘60s when it wasn’t a lauded school that everyone was dying to get into. Basically, if you lived in the state and had a heartbeat, they’d take you.

The tuition was very low. My family didn’t have any money, so I was just very lucky to be able to go there. I started out in biology because that was what I thought I wanted to do. I really loved biology, but once I began taking the courses and spending a lot of time in the lab, I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life.’ So I began, I think like a typical college student, jumping around from major to major. I don’t know how many majors I had until the summer between by junior year and senior year…I got a job interning for a congressman who was a former newspaperman. And he just got me interested in writing. I wrote press releases for him, and I saw how reporters were doing their job on Capitol Hill. And it just really seemed exciting, so when I went back in the fall for my last year, I realized I wanted to go into journalism.

HC: How’d you decide on television? 

CC: I picked television because at the time, television was just a baby. Newspapers were already beginning to die. The afternoon Washington, D.C. newspaper, The Evening Star, was just folding, and I decided that television was new enough to sort of allow women into the industry.

And off I went. It became quite a passion. It became my vocation, my love. Every waking moment was dedicated to my career. And it was a steady climb from being a local news reporter in Washington to a network news correspondent for CBS news covering the best stories you can imagine. The beats were the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department and Capitol Hill, so I would rotate around basically covering political news, and then presidential elections.

And I ended up getting the job that I never thought I would ever have. Walter Cronkite was my idol, so I became his follower throughout my career. He was my mentor. He was really wonderful to me. And I got half of his job. Dan Rather was anchoring the news at CBS News, and I became a co-anchor sitting next to him. So I was sitting in half of Walter Cronkite’s chair. It was a dream job.

HC: I can imagine. And as a woman at the time beat to it only by Barbara Walters, that must have felt pretty nice.

CC: That’s right. A few years earlier, she was the first woman co-anchor. I was the second. But I was the first woman at CBS to co-anchor the news. However, in the process I forgot to get married, I forgot to have a baby.

HC: Whoops.

CC: Well, while I was at NBC, I ended up getting married. I married Maury Povich, who was also in the television-news business at the time, and he switched from news to talk shows. But forgetting to have a baby was more problematic, you know? And that led to our deciding to adopt.

HC: How would you say you went about striking a balance between your career and family life?

CC: My sense is that juggling a career and personal life is very, very difficult. However, more and more women who are much younger than I will ever be have learned how to juggle a little better than I did. I think because I was one of the first women to break into television news, we really couldn’t take that time for our personal lives. We had to keep working away. Otherwise we would have lost ground.

HC: So really, you cleared the path for the rest of us in a lot of ways.

CC: I like to think that we did. But we were just doing our jobs. We were hard-nosed and determined to get there, and nothing was going to stop us.

HC: As for Her Campus readers, we’ve got a whole lot of college girls who are balancing their social and academic aspirations and lives. When you were our age and figuring out what you wanted to study, how might a friend have described you?

CC: I know this isn’t your question, but before I forget, one of the things that I think is so important for women to know is that unfortunately we are capable of being multi-taskers. Men, I don’t know this for sure, but their gender seems to have a very difficult time multitasking.

HC: Tell me about it.

CC: Bless their hearts. Some of them think they do. And indeed they often do—they’ll listen to music and do work and be on Facebook and text at the same time. But they’re really not as good as we are. One of the things that occurs to women is that if they do try to have a personal life in addition to a career, they are constantly stressed between the two and suffer great guilt thinking that they’re not giving either one enough attention. And I think it’s one of the reasons why women feel perpetually frustrated, whereas the men are able to compartmentalize their Wall Street jobs and their children and their marriage…For some reason, we still haven’t made the kind of progress that women want, which is complete equality in the workplace and at home. So the bottom line is that I hope we as women relax about thinking we need to do everything 100 percent perfectly in the workplace and in the home, professionally and personally…The goal is to not want to do everything perfectly, but instead just do everything well while you’re doing it, and when you leave that part of it, go do the personal thing really well while you’re doing it and forget about the other thing.