[6] Chung was a Washington, D.C.–based correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in the early 1970s during the Watergate political scandal.

Chung left to anchor evening newscasts for KNXT, a CBS owned and operated station in Los Angeles (now KCBS-TV).

[7] The Los Angeles Times TV columnist said Chung "helped give Channel 2 an agreeable, respectable, middle-road identity".

[9] Later that year, following Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee alleging she was sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh, Chung wrote an open letter to Blasey-Ford in which Chung said she was assaulted in college by the doctor who delivered her, during an appointment when she approached him for birth control.

[11] On June 1, 1993, she became the second woman (after Barbara Walters with ABC in 1976) to co-anchor a major network's national weekday news broadcast.

She eventually jumped to ABC News, where she co-hosted the Monday edition of 20/20 with Charles Gibson and began independent interviews.

Bill Carter for The New York Times reported, "Ms. Chung had become the object of some of the most ferocious criticism, justified or not, ever directed at any network anchor as a result of her now infamous interview with Speaker Newt Gingrich's mother, Kathleen".

In 1997, Chung moved to ABC News as a reporter on 20/20 and cohost of the Monday edition of the program alongside Charles Gibson.

In 2001, she conducted an interview with Gary Condit on Primetime Thursday, focusing on his relationship with murdered Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy.

[20] In July 2002, Chung interviewed tennis player Martina Navratilova, who at that time had been a naturalized U.S. citizen for more than 20 years, about her recent criticisms of the U.S. political system.

Chung labeled these criticisms "un-American" and "unpatriotic" and suggested Navratilova should "go back to Czechoslovakia" (which had ceased to be a united nation nine years earlier) rather than use her celebrity status to gain a platform for her complaints.

The show was canceled shortly thereafter; in its final episode that aired June 17, 2006, Chung—dressed in a white evening gown and dancing on top of a black piano—sang a parody to the tune of "Thanks for the Memory".

[27] In her early career, Chung was only the second woman and the first American of Asian descent to anchor a major nightly news program in the U.S. As such, for the growing number of new Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, she was a rare, nationally visible representative.

Many of these immigrant families, wanting their daughters to achieve and succeed, named their girls Connie after the one woman on mainstream media who could be seen as a role model for them.