Connie Chung Says She ‘Was Invisible’ to ‘Today’ Co-Host Bryant Gumbel

Former ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN anchor Connie Chung is dishing on her experience with her old Today show co-host Bryant Gumbel, saying at times she felt she was “invisible” next to the famous sportscaster. Chung opened up about her long journalism career on Andrew Goldman’s The Originals Podcast, where she revealed she faced challenges when it came to dealing with her some of her male counterparts.

“I didn’t have a very good experience with a lot of male co-anchors, because they suffer from something called bigshot-itis,” she said. “And it’s sort of delusions of grandeur and sort of narcissistic behavior and a feeling of inability to stop talking.” When it came to her former co-host, Chung admitted he was no exception. “I would say so. I’d be sitting beside him, but I was invisible.”

Though it wasn’t all bad. She continued to say, “in recent years he’s become a different guy. He married a wonderful woman [Hilary Quinlan]. She said, ‘Whatever it is between the two of you, we’re not doing that anymore.’”

The latter Bryant Gumbel conversation was cut from the episode, but was released as part of a Q&A for Los Angeles Magazine. Additionally, Chung discussed some of the rising tensions between her and other popular journalists Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Dan Rather, as well as how she got under the skin of Undoing star Hugh Grant in her time on set.

Chung thought when she started working with Walters and Sawyer that the experience would be fun and exciting considering that it would be three female journalists working together. Her time was another experience entirely, she describes.

“When I got to ABC, both Diane and Barbara were in the same sort of arena of trying to get these big interviews,” she said on the podcast. “So when I tried to go after them, I was told I could not. That Barbara and Diane were the only ones who could compete for the interview and I had to stand down. And I said, ‘Really?’”

Of her time working with Rather, the 74-year-old news anchor describes working with him as an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Chung told Goldman, though he may have appeared “very Texas gentlemanly” on the outside, “if I turned my back, I felt like I might be in a scene of ‘Psycho’ in the shower.” Listen to the full episode here.