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Diane Sawyer
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Diane Sawyer smiling and wearing a black top, with short blonde hair, at an event with blurred lights and people in the background. Don Hewitt and Diane Sawyer of CBS's 60 Minutes sit at a control panel with monitors showing broadcast footage in a television studio, New York City, 1987.
Quick Facts
Born:
December 22, 1945, Glasgow, Kentucky, U.S. (age 80)
Notable Family Members:
spouse Mike Nichols
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Diane Sawyer smiling and wearing a black top, with short blonde hair, at an event with blurred lights and people in the background.
Diane Sawyer, 2004.

Diane Sawyer

American journalist
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•History

Diane Sawyer (born December 22, 1945, Glasgow, Kentucky, U.S.) is an American television broadcast journalist who served as anchor (2009–14) of the ABC (American Broadcasting Company) World News program.

Sawyer grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. After earning a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1967, she returned to Louisville to work as a television weather reporter for station WLKY. In 1970 she joined the White House as a press aide under the Nixon administration and served as part of the Nixon-Ford transition team in 1974. After helping Nixon draft his memoirs (1974–75), she left politics to resume her career in television by becoming a news correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau of the CBS network.

Initially, Sawyer served as the network’s State Department correspondent. In 1981 she became a coanchor of CBS Morning News, and from 1982 to 1984 she coanchored the Early Morning News. Although both positions were prominent, it was her next position—as coanchor of the CBS prime-time television newsmagazine 60 Minutes—that solidified her place in the public eye. She joined the program as its first female anchor in 1984.

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In 1989 Sawyer left CBS to join ABC as a coanchor of its newsmagazine program Primetime Live (later called Primetime). Starting in 1994, she also appeared regularly on ABC’s hour-long single-topic show Turning Point, which ran for several years. In 1999 Sawyer became coanchor of Good Morning America, splitting her duties between it and Primetime. Sawyer left Good Morning America in 2009 to serve as anchor of ABC’s World News, a post she held until August 2014, when she stepped down.

A staple figure in American television news, Sawyer covered a broad range of topics in a variety of formats, from investigative news pieces to celebrity interviews. She received many awards for her work, including the grand prize (1992) of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for a Primetime Live investigation of racial discrimination in the United States, as well as several Emmy Awards and George Foster Peabody Awards. She was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame and the Broadcast Magazine Hall of Fame.

Sawyer was married to director Mike Nichols from 1988 until his death in 2014.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.