Critics slam Connie Chung's new show

This story is nothing but anti-Asian, anti-woman bias.

What's CNN?

I thought Connie Chung was at NBC.

"Just between you and me......"

Someone hung Chung?

But TV critic Tom Shales of The Washington Post said Chung "still lights up the screen the way glamorous movie queens used to do."

This says it all, and it's why people like Chung will continue to get "face time" with big network execs. It's simply the Cult of Celebrity.

See, these people all make the same "celebrity" cocktail parties, they have the same agents, etc. They believe their own press clippings.

Connie Chung is a "celebrity," ergo she's invariably going to resurface somewhere, like Jason on the Friday the Thirteenth flicks. THEY think that WE want to see celebs yakking it up with other celebs in an endless round of jocular familiarity.

Why do they think this? Because most of the time it works; that's why you had to look at Rosie O'Donnell's posterior-like face for lo these many years. People just love to hear these chowderheads dish.

For myself, I can't figure it out. When I've been a captive audience at the gym during "Rosie" time, for instance, I have noticed that my gorge rises on cue every single time.

So bad these shows might be, but they're going to keep paradin' 'em out in front of us for the simple reason that they sell laundry detergent.

I like her new show. O'Reilly seems to have gone off the deep end lately and she may be the one to dip his numbers.

But TV critic Tom Shales of The Washington Post said Chung "still lights up the screen the way glamorous movie queens used to do."

Its the cult of the liberal psuedo snob, hoping that Chung would drive O'Reilly off the air, which is not gonna happen.

O'Reilly seems to have gone off the deep end lately and she may be the one to dip his numbers

O'Reilly went off the deep end a long time ago, with his populist, kook rants. But Connie Chung sure as hell isn't going to be the one to take him out. Neither is Phil Donahue.

I saw only part of her show. She had an interstng guest on yesterday. A man who lives in a cabin with no electricity.

However, for the Wash. Post to label her glamorous is absurd. Her overpainted and gaudy face looked awful. Reminded me of those ugly little dolls with the painted faces I saw once at a bazaar.

Tunku, tell us how you really feel :)

overpowering solipsism

Huh?

Tom Shales on Bernard Goldberg:

Disgruntled has-beens everywhere have a new hero and role model: Bernard Goldberg, the one-time CBS News correspondent and full-time addlepated windbag who is trying to make a second career out of trashing his former employer. Goldberg has picked this moment in time to haul out the old canard about the media being "liberal" and the news being slanted leftward.

It's the first refuge of a no-talent hack, that argument, and about as old as the printing press; in fact, wasn't poor old Gutenberg denounced in some circles as a heretic and a radical? Mr. Goldberg would have been leading the charge, especially if he'd earlier attempted to work in Mr. Gutenberg's shop and had made a spectacular botch of it.

Obviously hoping to follow in the footsteps of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, two intellectual giants by comparison, Goldberg has fashioned his rantings into a book succinctly titled "Bias," which, appropriately enough, won the dubious honor of a commendatory editorial from The Wall Street Journal. And we all know how unbiased those Journal editorials are. Gosh it is soooo hard to figure out where they're coming from.

Goldberg's laughably inept hate campaign began in the Journal in 1996 when it published his tirade, "Networks Need a Reality Check." Goldberg's specialty is conjuring vast, sweeping generalizations that fit in with his own very obvious bias and are based on the tiniest of specifics rather than well-researched evidence. In his poorly written (and poorly edited) WSJ piece, Goldberg lambasted network news divisions for flagrant leftiness on the basis of one single piece that Eric Engberg had done for "CBS Evening News."

Master of self-defeat

First off, Engberg's piece had carried the "Reality Check" label, which means, though Goldberg may not understand the concept, that it is by definition a signed personal piece, one designed to re-examine some item in the news. The item in this case, and we all remember it so well (as it has proven terribly significant in the intervening years), was a "flat tax" proposed by would-be presidential candidate Steve Forbes as a way of reforming America's terribly flawed income-tax system.

Alas for him, Goldberg picked a poor example. Forbes' flat tax was hardly the kind of issue that sharply divided proponents along liberal and conservative lines; some conservatives hated it. There weren't any marches on Washington over it, either. The flat tax wasn't even a bold new idea; it had been kicking around for decades.

Goldberg clumsily weakened his own argument about a liberal conspiracy leading to such pieces as Engberg's when he conceded in his article that since TV and print reporters tend to be "dunces" about economic issues (Goldberg himself no doubt being a glorious exception), ignorance "as much as bias" can lead to erroneous reporting. Goldberg was not only a flop as a network correspondent, he's a lousy writer besides.

Quoting Engberg as having referred to one aspect of the Forbes plan as being its "wackiest," Goldberg then asked in rhetorical high dudgeon, "Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, a network news reporter calling Hillary Clinton's health care plan 'wacky?' Can you imagine any editor allowing it?" Well, frankly, yes. But Hillary Clinton and Steve Forbes were not on an equal plane. She was first lady of the land and he was a national non-entity trying desperately to draw attention to his failing bid for a presidential nomination.

Bernard and me

Does Goldberg think that the press was particularly loving and deferential to Hillary Clinton? Has there been in modern times a first lady who suffered worse press and worse relations with the press than poor Hill? His arguments were drivel.

I had my own unpleasant experience with Goldberg. He also fired off op-ed pieces for The New York Times, and occasionally one got printed. The one I read was some mish-moshy thing in which he quoted from TV reviews by me and by John J. O'Connor, then the Times TV critic, and because we apparently agreed about one program, Goldberg from this drew the conclusion that all TV critics write as a monolith and agree with each other all the time. A patently preposterous contention.

Goldberg was, let's face it, not a bright shining star in the firmament of CBS News. He usually looked disheveled and bleary-eyed on the air, and appearance does count in a visual medium. I remember a piece he did in the aftermath of a hurricane that could have ended eloquently on a shot of some household item sitting amid the horrible wasteland of debris. Instead the piece ended with Goldberg's sallow face and his own lame attempts at poignancy.

Rebel without a clue

If things didn't go his way at CBS News, it may have been less a communist conspiracy against him than the fact that the place is to some degree a meritocracy.

The Journal editorial, so loaded and intentionally myopic as to be rather funny, notes that viewership of network evening newscasts dropped from a 51 percent tune-in in 1994 to 43 percent in "the summer of 2001" and imagines that disgust with liberal bias is a key factor, when everyone knows the networks face more and more competition each year from the increased number of cable channels-news and non-news-that lure viewers away. Dan Rather and the "CBS Evening News" have lost viewers partly because of the horrendous mismanagement of former CBS Chairman Laurence Tisch (a draconian cost-cutter whom the Journal doubt reveres as a living saint) and the loss of affiliates in urban markets due to a raid by Fox.

Finally, notes the Journal, Goldberg is being assailed by former CBS News colleagues for failing so conspicuously (and for who knows how large a book advance) to be a "team player." Concludes the Journal, "Like it or not, the TV networks could use a few more non-team players like Mr. Goldberg."

Oh really? Oh could they? And pray tell how many "non-team players" such as Mr. Goldberg would the editors and publisher of The Wall Street Journal like to have on the staff? How many would be richly praised and rewarded for, say, writing an op-ed piece in the Times complaining that the Journal's editorial about Bernard Goldberg was an embarrassingly transparent piece of corporate-dictated hogwash?

I do hope one tries. It could be such an inspiration to us all.

====================================

Shales is just a paid celebrity worshipper who knows who his masters are, just as you said. ;-)

Connie Chung's world IS Connie Chung. ;-)

I happen to surf through CNN yesterday when she was trying to interview the SEC chairman. He did everything but roll his eyes. She is awful and unwatchable.



June 27, 2002

TELEVISION

Ms. Chung's Debut on CNN
Soars Like, Well, a Turkey

By TUNKU VARADARAJAN

On watching Monday's debut of "Connie Chung Tonight," my first thought -- admittedly wicked -- was to ask myself how much Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, had paid CNN for the favor.

Ms. Chung's new show on CNN goes head-to-head at 8 p.m. EDT with "The O'Reilly Factor," and after tuning in to her for the first two nights I cannot help but think that Bill O'Reilly -- a competitive, swaggering bruiser with not an ounce of tendresse on his elongated frame -- is readying his broiler to burn this turkey to a cinder.

This much I'll say: Ms. Chung wasn't as awful on her second night as she was on her first, when she turned in the tackiest, most emetic performance I can remember having seen on "serious" TV.

From the opening sequence that first night, in which one got a series of seductive freeze-frames -- did I hear anyone say that the looks of female anchors don't matter? -- to the very end, in which she said "Goodnight Maury and Matthew," to her husband and son respectively, one was treated to a display of such overpowering solipsism that one had to wonder why any of the guests on the show had even bothered to turn up.

Mercifully, on night two, Ms. Chung elected not to bid goodnight to the family. Which makes me ask why she did it in the first place: Was it to show the world that she was a great mom and a great professional? Which makes me ask, also, how we would have reacted if Aaron Brown had said night-night to the folks back home on his debut. (Of course this is hypothetical; Mr. Brown, I'm sure, would rather die than be so gaudy on air. Ms. Chung, however, assumed we'd think it was cute.)

On night two, Ms. Chung showed such a degree of improvement as to suggest that the executives at CNN were so alarmed by her first outing that they pulled out all the stops to make the second one work a little better. To be fair, President Bush's speech calling for a democratic Palestine, delivered late on Monday morning, must have upset Ms. Chung's carefully constructed first-night plans. She had hoped to kick off with her prize "get" -- TV jargon for desirable catch -- the brother-in-law of Terry Lynn Barton, the Forest Service employee accused of starting a 137,000-acre blaze in Colorado. Instead, she had to scramble together a segment on the Middle East, and her underpreparedness showed.

The brother-in-law fella, when he did come on, was out of his depth on national TV -- and one felt sorry for the guy. But to the Connie Chung school of audience enlightenment, he was the perfect guest.

Nervous and vulnerable, this bit-player in a larger tragedy was just the kind of interlocutor Ms. Chung cherishes. He enabled her to lean forward and ask, "What do you really think?" This is a variant on that other incisive question -- "How do you really feel?" -- that Ms. Chung has made her trademark, allowing her to assume always that patented look of impeccable earnestness.

Ms. Chung empathized her way through this and other segments. She talked to a potential pedophile, who'd been turned in to the cops by "Dear Abby," to whom he'd written in despair. ("Do you actually experience fantasies?" Ms. Chung asked.) And she talked to the parents and girlfriend of a teen who'd died from too much heroin.

"What's the hardest thing about his death?" Ms. Chung asked the girlfriend, who looked about 16. Precociously, she answered: "The nights are the hardest. I'd go to sleep in his arms, wake up in his arms." Cut to Connie, pain etched on her face, eyes narrowed in well-versed condolence. If other viewers were as unimpressed by this as I was, "Connie Chung Tonight" is in a black hole.

The better moments of her show came in the segments where she had the really big "gets." Luciano Pavarotti, interviewed by Ms. Chung at his villa in Italy, was, as you'd expect, hefty and vulgar and good value. Perhaps eager to see Ms. Chung back on a plane to New York as quickly as possible, he threw a little scoop-ette her way, saying he'd retire from opera in three years.

Bear in mind that he'll be 70 in 2005, an age at which you'd expect him to be pitting his dentures against plates of gnocchi, not belting out Puccini at the Met. But on hearing Mr. Pavarotti say, "In three years I'll retire," Ms. Chung jerked to the edge of her seat like some overeager Gidget and purred, "Honestly?! You will? You have never announced your retirement!"

"Yes," confirmed the big man, to which Ms. Chung, oozing more excitement than is good for a lady of her composure, said, "You will! Do you promise? Will you hold to that date?" Mr. Pavarotti smiled. Ms. Chung beamed. America winced.

Oh dear, I thought. Poor Connie Chung. Poor, poor CNN. Lucky, lucky, lucky Bill O'Reilly.

Mr. Varadarajan is the Journal's chief television and media critic.

	URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1025130446958344480.djm,00.html

Updated June 27, 2002 1:21 a.m. EDT

No wonder! I was channel-surfing and came across her show. She was interviewing some surburbanite who chucked it all to become a live-of-the-land hippie, complete with long hippie hair and beard. Someone needs to tell her the sixties are over.

I saw that guy on her show yesterday. I have no idea why I stopped on the channel when I was flipping through. His name was Eustance Conway. I was struck by his ability to speak clear and perfect english. He was quite interesting and worth watching. He didnt seem to have any 'agenda' from what I gathered. He basically came on and talked about himself and how he lived. No more no less.

The question I wanted answered was how this guy was able to amass a 1,000 acre tract of land.

I could easily see myself living a similar lifestyle to his. Though certain modern comforts would be needed. Like indoor plumbing.

I would love to live out in the country. But my wife won't do it. "Too far from the mall" she says.

I agree wit your comments. I also wondered where he obtained the money since he left home at age 17 and seemd to hold no job. Possbly he sold pelts. However, I doubt that would bring enough money.