Connie Chung is a Chinese-American journalist and newsreader. It’s possible she caught your eye at the 60th anniversary of the Miss Universe contest. No, she was not one of the contestants. She was one of the seven television judges in the Miss Universe Pageant of 2011.
If not, you know her from either NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN or MSNBC. She was literally all over the US television news channels.
It’s true, Connie Chung is famous for interviewing the Los Angeles Lakers’ first basketball legend, Earvin “Magic” Johnson after he announced to the public that he was HIV positive. But then she also got a lot of attention for an exclusive interview with US representative Gary Condit about the disappearance of Chandra Levy; an intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons who disappeared in May 2001.
The American journalist has received several awards for her contributions to this field. She has received three Emmy Awards, the George Foster Peabody Award, and the Amnesty International Human Rights Award. Independently, Connie Chung has received a handful of awards for an investigative report on a civil rights incident in 1966. It is said that her report led to the indictment, trial, and conviction of a murderer three decades later.
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Sometime in 2013, Chung was nominated for induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame for public service. Three years later, she was inducted into the 2016 New Jersey Hall of Fame in the Arts and Letters category.
Sometime in 1993, the story documented that Chung was the first Asian and second woman to host one of the most important news programs on American television. She was the first woman to co-host the “CBS Evening News”.
Connie Chung Wiki/Bio
Connie Chung was born as Constance Yu-Hwa Chung Povich on August 20, 1946. The last child of her parents’ 10 children, Chung was born a few months after her family immigrated to the USA. She was born and raised in Washington D.C.
We found out that Chung’s father, William Ling Chung, worked as a secret service agent in the Chinese nationalist government. He lost five of his children in the war and immigrated to America with the remaining five in 1945.
For high school, Chung attended Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. When she graduated, she went to the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1969, Chung earned a degree in journalism from the institution.
It is on record that Chung was a Harvard Scholar at the Joan Shorenstein Center of the J.F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She has held a number of top journalism positions at the University of Maryland and other prominent educational institutions.
Connie Chung prefers to refer to herself as Chinese rather than Chinese-American. She once admitted that she is an American, but explained that she does not see herself as half American and half Chinese because both her parents are from China.
Connie Chung Career/Salary/Net Worth
Connie traced her decision to become a journalist back to 1969 when, after an internship watching reporters at work, she decided to study television journalism in college.
Nevertheless, her journalistic career began when she was employed as a secretary at WTTG-TV in Washington. Eventually, she became a reporter and worked for various American television news stations.
Despite the awards that Connie Chung has received during her journalistic career, she is considered one of the most criticized journalists due to her interview with Kathleen Gingrich, the mother of Republican politician Newt Gingrich.
In short, Chung was overly grilled and crucified because she tricked Kathleen into saying that her son thought the then First Lady, Hillary Clinton, was a bitch.
Connie Chung Net Worth…
Over the years, a handful of different numbers have been listed as Connie Chung’s net worth. While some estimated her net worth to be up to $45 million, others stated that it was less than half that amount – $15 million.
The various figures given as Connie Chung’s net worth have made it difficult to authenticate these figures. Nevertheless, Heightline can confirm that Chung earned up to $2 million a year when she was on CNN. This came to light when the Cable News Network announced it was pulling the plug on its “Connie Chung Tonight” show.
Connie Chung Husband/Divorce/Children
Connie Chung has never been through a divorce. She married her talk show host Maury Povich in 1984 at the age of 38.
Chung is Povich’s second wife. He was married to Phyllis Minkoff for 17 years and they had two daughters – Susan and Amy.
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Chung and Povich supposedly met when she was on WTTG-TV. While working at the CBS Los Angeles office, Povich was in charge of the news with Connie Chung. After Povich separated from his first wife, Chung dated him for almost seven years. When they finally got married, Povich hesitated to have children with Chung because he was already the father of two daughters.
But then, Chung wanted a child of her own and Povich wanted to make her happy, so in 1995 they adopted a son, Matthew Jay Povich. That was after she tried in vitro fertilization.
There was a time when Chung was talking about her career and marriage to Povich. She said:
“I was just about to go for that career – boom, boom, boom! Then suddenly, at 38, Oh, my God – I forgot to get married!”
In 2007, Chung and Povich started a newspaper called Flathead Beacon in Flathead Valley, Montana, where they call home.
