Longtime midcoast Maine summer visitors Connie Chung and Maury Povich nearly got into it in a verbal battle over a major network’s realignment.
Povich’s family still owns property in Bath, where they ran a well-known clothing store starting in 1919.
Povich, who claims he’s the cool-headed one at home, says he and Connie got into a heated argument over changes at CBS-TV.
CBS is also the network where Chung flamed out after failing to bring in the numbers when she tried her hand at the anchor desk.
Povich, who hosted a Jerry Springer-style network daytime show – or, more aptly, wrestling match – tells USA Today he and his bride went at it pretty good recently in a dispute over corporate changes at CBS News.
“The veteran TV journalist and ‘king of talk TV’ says he’s keeping an open mind about the major changes happening at CBS – even if he and his wife don’t agree,” says the USA Today story.
Chung is reportedly standing firm in her view that CBS parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media and the appointment of Bari Weiss as CBS News’ editor-in-chief is wrong for journalism, but her husband doesn’t see the question as black and white.
“She was talking about the CBS situation and how she didn’t understand how the new ownership of Paramount could hire somebody like Bari Weiss, who had never been in television, to run their news department, and I just said: ‘Well, you don’t know. Let’s just wait and see.’ And she just jumped at me,” Povich says.
“She shot me down pretty quick,” he added.
Chung is seemingly still steaming for what she claims was the sexist culture at CBS when she failed her anchor gig.
In fact, in a memoir she published last year, Chung lashed out at veteran former CBS anchor Dan Rather for trying to get her pushed out the door due to his “bias against women.”
The Povich presence in Bath dates to 1919 when the family, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who settled in Maine, bought property on Front Street.
The Povich family, which still owns Front Street property, operated a clothing store there until 1994.
Maury Povich’s father, legendary Washington Post sports reporter Shirley Povich, was born in Bar Harbor.
Then-Vice President Richard Nixon once told Post publisher Phil Graham: “Shirley Povich is the only reason I read your newspaper.”
Graham’s widow was publisher when the paper’s Watergate coverage led Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974.
