Flashback is a feature series that revisits key moments from TV news history with the Newsers that were part of them.
With apologies to the late, great George Carlin, there are actually eight words you can never say on television. Connie Chung learned that lesson the hard way 30 years ago when a certain five-letter word uttered during a high-profile interview spelled the end of her storied CBS News career.
On Jan. 5, 1995, the pioneering journalist sat down with Kathleen Gingrich, mother of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, for a timely edition of her newsmagazine Eye to Eye. The Georgia Republican had just led the GOP to a resounding midterm victory that reset Congress’ relationship with then-President Bill Clinton, and his antipathy towards both POTUS and former FLOTUS Hillary Clinton was well-known within Washington, D.C. circles… and, as it turned out, his own family.
Midway through her interview with Kathleen Gingrich, Chung learned exactly what her son thought of the first lady. “I can’t tell you what he’s said about Hillary,” Gingrich initially said, at which point Chung invited her to “whisper it to me” on-camera. The 69-year-old leaned in and whispered—clearly enough for the audience to hear—“She’s a b****.”
That whisper opened the floodgates for Chung came to call “B****gate,” which led to recriminations from the Gingrich family, as well as other politicians and journalists. It also directly contributed to her departure from CBS later that year after being removed as the CBS Evening News co-anchor alongside Dan Rather.
“That was a nail in the coffin,” Chung recently told TVNewser during a conversation about her bestselling autobiography, Connie: A Memoir.
Three decades later, she characterizes the interview and the ensuing controversy as a “crazy sequence of events,” where she became a “lightning rod” in a larger debate about how the family members of prominent politicians should be treated by the news media. To this day, though, Chung maintains that Kathleen Gingrich—who died in 2003—knew exactly what she was doing when she decided to drop the “B” word on national television.
“She was happy to be the star and to tell what she knew and what she didn’t know,” Chung says. “I could see that was where Newt Gingrich got his outlandish feistiness from.”