Connie Chung experienced the tension between the late Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer firsthand when she worked 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, told Us Weekly exclusively while promoting her book, Connie: A Memoir. “I was foolish to believe that we could be this triumvirate of strong women.”
Chung wrote in her memoir, published on Tuesday, September 17, about finding herself stuck between Walters and Sawyer, 78, when they were 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.”
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.”
Chung has since had some time to reflect on Walters and Sawyer’s rivalry.
“The reason was clear to me now, as I look back on it,” Chung explained to Us ahead of her book’s release. “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 though Chung is no longer anchoring the news, she does think that things have changed.
“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 explained 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 women and minorities have made “a lot of progress” in the news business, Chung said there’s still a long way 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.