Sawyer Nabbed Anchor Job by 'Waiting Around'

What Diane Sawyer has achieved as the second female solo news anchor is “more subtle” than Katie Couric’s ascendancy, writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times. Sawyer “is a gorgeous, glamorous television personality who got to the top job by waiting around,” Stanley notes. It has smoothed “bumps in her résumé that at one time seemed insurmountable.”

For instance, she went straight from working with Richard Nixon to working at CBS News at a time “when the line between journalism and government was virtually inviolate," Stanley writes. The problem with waiting is that women are becoming the majority of network news anchors just as the programs are losing “relevance and prestige,” she notes. “As in other fields, women seem to break through the glass ceiling just as the air-conditioning is being turned off in the penthouse office suites.”