Connie Chung skilled the stress between the late Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer firsthand when she labored for ABC News and as a reporter for 20/20.
“I understand why they weren’t gathering with me and fighting the men. I was just stupid,” Chung, 78, instructed Us Weekly completely whereas selling her e book, Connie: A Memoir. “I was foolish to believe that we could be this triumvirate of strong women.”
Chung wrote in her memoir, revealed on Tuesday, September 17, about discovering herself caught between Walters and Sawyer, 78, once they have been all colleagues. (Walters died in December 2022 at age 93.)
“Instead of battling men, I found myself squeezed between two people I thought should have been allies,” she wrote. “I’d foolishly believed the women would be my comrades.”
Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters. Getty Images(3)
Chung went on to say that she had watched their “same-sex battle” from the sidelines as a “disappointed and perplexed” anchor.
“I could see taking on the men who were denying us equality. But I could not see the value of Diane butting heads with the woman who had paved the way for all of us,” she wrote. “Frankly, I believed Barbara Walters had earned the right to be a diva, to push anybody off the cliff who tried to dethrone her.”
A tv icon. Barbara Walters spent six a long time as a hard-hitting journalist — interviewing everybody from controversial political leaders to a few of the world’s most high-profile stars — previous to her retirement in 2014. Walters kicked off her profession in the Nineteen Sixties on the Today present, the place she went from working behind the scenes as […]
Chung has since had a while to replicate on Walters and Sawyer’s rivalry.
“The reason was clear to me now, as I look back on it,” Chung defined to Us forward of her e book’s launch. “Women were given such a skinny sliver of the whole pie. You got this whole pie that the men dominated. We would get this tiny little sliver, hair thin. The women felt this need to compete against each other — and that’s crazy.”
Even although Chung is now not anchoring the information, she does suppose that issues have modified.
“Fortunately, today, I think women have joined together much more because there are more women. We were given a bigger piece of the pie,” she defined to Us. “But it has not reached a level of 50/50 — not by any means. It hasn’t reached parity. So, we have to just keep pushing. [Be] pushy, pushy. We just have to keep it up.”
While ladies and minorities have made “a lot of progress” in the information enterprise, Chung mentioned there’s nonetheless an extended method to go.
“I was a bit shocked at how much progress we haven’t made,” she shared. “Women still have to — we have to prove ourselves. We want to be 150 percent better. I wish we could get over trying to prove ourselves, but we are faced with this paradigm out there that is still male dominated. But we see signs, good signs, that maybe we can reach those upper level jobs.”
Connie: A Memoir is out now.
