It was Tuesday morning, the day after Labor Day, and Diane Sawyer was smiling brightly and wearing black. Toward the top of the hour, Chris Cuomo, one of her co-anchors on Good Morning America, looked at the camera and ran through the morning’s headlines. There was swine flu spreading rapidly through American schools, an alleged serial killer arrested in Milwaukee, great white sharks off the coast of Cape Cod, bombings in Afghanistan, cracks in San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and a journalist in Sudan convicted of wearing pants in public. 

The news mix was titillating, dire and demographically on point. You could practically feel the collective anxiety emanating from the hundreds of thousands of middle-aged female viewers from around the country as Mr. Cuomo brought the roundup to a lighthearted close. The island nation of Samoa, he explained, had decided for the first time in 40 years to switch the side of the road their citizens drive on. Imagine the chaos of that commute! There was a clip of traffic run amok. “It’s a complicated transition,” Mr. Cuomo explained.

Ms. Sawyer sat a few feet away and listened to Mr. Cuomo’s report on the challenges facing Samoan commuters with a facial expression more or less passing for acute interest.

Six days earlier, ABC News executives had confirmed a scoop on the Drudge Report that, come December, Ms. Sawyer’s longtime colleague Charles Gibson would be retiring from the evening news program, World News. Ms. Sawyer would be taking over as anchor of that half-hour, as managing editor of the newsroom and as the unofficial public face of the network.

Like the sudden reversal of traffic laws, the changing of evening news anchors has historically resulted in complicated transitions. But so far, one week after the announcement, head-on-head collisions have yet to materialize. Most of the rubbernecking has been equally benign. A report in the Daily Beast suggested that Mr. Gibson was livid about something or other regarding the transition. Subsequently, a report in Newsday suggested that Mr. Gibson was upset about the timing of the announcement, coming as it did before Labor Day, when admittedly nobody much felt like whipping themselves into the paroxysms of giddy analysis that typically accompany word on an evening newscast succession. ABC denied both reports.

Inside ABC News, the announcement was met with more shoulder shrugging than teeth gnashing. Several sources told The Observer that, if anything, they had expected Mr. Gibson to have retired sooner after last year’s election. Others were surprised that Mr. Gibson would give up such a cushy position for no apparent reason other than his stated desire to spend more time with his wife, who is likewise retired. Nobody seemed at all shocked that Ms. Sawyer was being given the job.

Instead, much of the water-cooler talk focused on speculation about what would happen next at Good Morning America. Would ABC find a replacement in time for the November sweeps? Or would they use the sweeps as a farewell tour for Ms. Sawyer?

Which is not to say that the newsroom was free of anxiety. Whereas Mr. Gibson is said to work well with whatever producers happen to surround him, Ms. Sawyer has a reputation for being particular. Will she overhaul the World News roster? The general sense, among The Observer’s sources, was that much of the inevitable drama of anchor succession still lies ahead. “They have four months to figure this out,” said one source. “But four months can go by awfully fast in television.”

 

OUTSIDE THE NETWORK, media critics have struggled to work up much of a frenzy over the appointment. “Why the 63-year-old Sawyer would want to enter this dying news genre confounds reason—unless she’s simply weary of rising in the early a.m. to appear on Good Morning America, which she’s co-hosted since 1999,” wrote Slate’s Jack Shafer.

Ms. Sawyer may be tired of the early-morning drudgery of her current job. And, to be sure, audiences for the broadcast evening newscasts continue to shrink and get older. But to say that the job of anchoring the evening news is not what it once was—that it’s a throne diminished—is to miss the point of the attraction for Ms. Sawyer.

Everything in modern media is diminished. So what else should one of the last remaining TV news superstars of the late 20th century aspire to do for her final act?

“Even though it’s fast declining, the evening newscasts collectively still get almost 25 million people a night,” said The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta. “This is a smart woman who suffered the indignity of morning news. You’re doing a lot of Michael Jackson stuff. Sometimes she did it too gleefully, which hurt her. Now it’s a chance for her to do what she’s been trying to do in the morning—that is, show off her serious side.

“It’s not just being the anchor,” he added. “It means that at any special breaking news event, she’s there. She’s the boss.”

World News is currently in second place in the ratings, but in her new job, Ms. Sawyer will have some relative advantages over her competitors at NBC and CBS. NBC, for instance, according to Jeff Zucker, is fast becoming a cable company with a broadcasting unit—not the other way around. During big news events (such as the 2008 presidential campaign), NBC News reporters fight for airtime on MSNBC. The relative importance of getting on the evening news is diminished by proximity. For the time being, ABC News has no such internal cable competition. Airtime on the broadcast news remains of utmost importance. Soon, Ms. Sawyer will largely control it.

And when it comes to landing the top hard news exclusives, Ms. Sawyer should face minimal competition within ABC. Barbara Walters has The View. George Stephanopoulos has carved out his territory inside D.C. Otherwise, there aren’t too many rival power centers within the organization. While Katie Couric must continuously keep an eye on her fellow megafauna at 60 Minutes, Ms. Sawyer should face little resistance in pursuing whatever piques her interest. And whereas it took Ms. Couric a long stretch before making an alliance with 48 Hours executive producer Susan Zirinksy—thereby opening the door to regular prime-time appearances—Ms. Sawyer will walk into her new job, keys to ABC’s prime time in hand.

 

“SHE’S THE LAST one standing of Roone Arledge’s college of cardinals,” said encyclopedic TV critic Andrew Tyndall. “She’s the last superstar that he threw money at in the late ’80s and early ’90s to assemble what was a fantastic operation and is now something of an anachronism. Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, David Brinkley, Barbara Walters, Sam Donaldson, Hugh Downs—she’s the last one, right?”

Although, Ms. Walters remains a force of nature at ABC, her role on The View for the most part keeps her far away from hard news. As for the other talented prodigies of Mr. Arledge, Ms. Sawyer has outlasted them all. How did she manage to hang around long enough to land the top reporting job in the news division, long after the likes of Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson had been voted off the island?

Like any good political operative, Ms. Sawyer employed an instinctive mix of charm, flattery, opportunism, self-sacrifice, hard work and cunning. And she made the right alliance with the right person at the right time.

It would have been easy, when the moment arrived in 1998, to sit back and watch David Westin, the newly appointed president of ABC News, struggle. At the time, his grip on the position was perilous. From the get-go, the fresh-faced career lawyer–turned–TV executive looked like a fawn next to his predecessor, Roone Arledge, a swaggering buck of bluster, who had previously chased off a handful of heirs apparent. 

To make matters worse, shortly before taking over as president, Mr. Westin got caught in a scandal. His affair with the head of ABC’s public-relations department, Sherrie Rollins, then the wife of political operative Ed Rollins, became public. Paparazzi swarmed. His survival at ABC News came into question.

It can be fun to watch your new boss flounder. And there were some seasoned veterans at ABC news who no doubt did just that. But not Ms. Sawyer. She never underestimated Mr. Westin, who is said to enjoy a strong relationship with Disney chief Bob Iger as well as Anne Sweeney, the head of the ABC/Disney television group.

Prior to Mr. Westin’s arrival, Ms. Sawyer was already friends with Sherrie Rollins. Now, she went about becoming friends and allies with her new boss, her friend’s lover.

In the end, it was Ms. Sawyer and her husband, the writer, director and producer Mike Nichols (and not, say, Sam Donaldson or Hugh Downs), who threw an intimate wedding party for Mr. Westin and Ms. Rollins at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, far from the gnawing jaws of Manhattan gossips. It was Ms. Sawyer and her husband who welcomed Mr. Westin into the protective harbor of their social circle. And it was Ms. Sawyer and her husband who warded off the circling buzzards.

The growing friendship was on full display back at ABC News, according to a source who worked with executives at ABC in the late ’90s. “I got the sense that David was more social with Mike and Diane than he was with most of the other talent,” said our source.

The courtship worked in two directions. Mr. Westin grew up in a religious family in Ann Arbor, Mich. As a young man, he did not have the opportunity to watch Mr. Nichols’ films. Now he went back and worked his way through the oeuvre, marveling at the genius of Carnal Knowledge and The Graduate. When Mr. Westin and his new wife eventually got a puppy together, they named the newest member of their family “Nichols,” after Ms. Sawyer’s husband.

Indeed, the bonds between Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Westin run deep. Some TV news executives who spoke to The Observer in recent days speculated that Ms. Sawyer saved Mr. Westin’s job in 1999 when she agreed, along with Charles Gibson, to co-host GMA, which was tanking at the time. (In reality, Mr. Westin deserves much of the credit for saving GMA, the news division’s most lucrative franchise, by smoothly pulling off the tricky solution.) Mr. Westin owed her, goes the theory. And now, at long last, that debt has been repayed.

 

THE JOB OF evening news anchor is one of the last great solo gigs in broadcast television, along with that of talk show host. Over the years, Ms. Sawyer’s career has almost always been yoked to the gravitational pull of some larger-than-life, usually volatile male news anchor. In 1984, when Don Hewitt tapped her to become the sole female correspondent on 60 Minutes, she worked alongside a pack of alpha newsmen, including Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley. In 1986, when her contract was up, her agent Richard Leibner pushed to have her hired as a co-anchor of the evening news at both NBC and ABC. At the time, Peter Jennings reportedly said that he didn’t “go through all the crap” over the years “in order to divide up 22 minutes.” Tom Brokaw’s reaction, according to the 1992 book Three Blind Mice, by Ken Auletta: “No way. If that happens, I leave.”

Eventually, in 1989, Arledge lured her away from CBS News and promptly paired her up with the über-cantankerous newsman of the era, Sam Donaldson. Later, she was briefly teamed up on a newsmagazine program with Barbara Walters. For the first seven years of her current stint on GMA, she sat alongside Charles Gibson.

In other words: No one should appreciate the autonomy of a solo anchor job more than Ms. Sawyer.

There will be other perks. When the 2012 election rolls around, it will be Ms. Sawyer who gets to moderate whatever debates ABC News stages (an opportunity she missed out on in 2008). And, in general, her regal bearing will no doubt be better suited to the Voice of God evening newscast than the Everyman banter of morning news.

When she first took the GMA gig 10 years ago, it was supposed to be temporary. A decade later, Ms. Sawyer looks more than ready to say goodbye to the teeny-bopper summer bands, the insta-famous reality stars, the self-help gurus, the fad diet proselytizers and the relationship czars, all of whom make up the daily plankton on which morning news programs feed. The evening news, by contrast, remains one of the last bastions in TV news that is more or less free from the hell broth of tabloid reporting.

Back in the ABC studios on Tuesday morning, Mr. Cuomo was explaining that a big issue with the traffic transition in Samoa was that buses would now have doors on the wrong side of the street.

On cue, Ms. Sawyer snapped to life. “So they’re switching so that they can get easier access to automobiles there because they’re so near Australia,” said Mr. Sawyer. “But 70 percent of the world’s population”—comedic pause—“drive on our side of the street.”

She emphasized the “our side of the street” with a playful wag of her blond hair and an exaggerated finger point. Such are the demands of journalism at 7:15 in the morning.

There were smiles all around. Things were coming to a happy end. Ms. Sawyer, in a singsong voice, called out to meteorologist Sam Champion. It was time for another look at the morning weather.

fgillette@observer.com