Lila Diane Sawyer (/ˈsɔːjər/; born December 22, 1945) is an American television broadcast journalist known for anchoring major programs on two networks including ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, 20/20, and Primetime newsmagazine while at ABC News.

Prior to her journalism career, she was a member of U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House staff and assisted in his post-presidency memoirs.

[4] Soon after her birth, her family moved to Louisville, where her father rose to local prominence as a Republican politician and community leader.

[citation needed] Insecure and something of a loner as a teen, Diane found happiness, she later said, going off by herself or with a group of friends that called themselves "reincarnated transcendentalists" and read Emerson and Thoreau down by a creek.

[citation needed] In her senior year of high school in 1963, she won the annual America's Junior Miss scholarship pageant representing Kentucky.

She won by her strength of poise in the final interview and her essay comparing the music of the North and the South during the Civil War.

[7] From 1963 to 1965, Sawyer toured the country as America's Junior Miss to promote the Coca-Cola Pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair.

In 1970, Sawyer moved to Washington, D.C., and, unable to find work as a broadcast journalist, she interviewed for positions in government offices.

Initially, Sawyer wrote press releases and quickly graduated to other tasks like drafting some of President Richard Nixon's public statements.

[11] Years later, Sawyer would be suspected of being Deep Throat, the source of leaks of classified information to journalist Bob Woodward during the Watergate scandal.

Sawyer was the first to announce to Good Morning America viewers that the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Sawyer achieved worldwide acclaim after subjecting Mel Gibson to an intense television interrogation, after his 2006 DUI arrest.

[15] On September 2, 2009, Sawyer was announced as the successor to Charles Gibson, who retired as the anchor of ABC World News, on Friday, December 18, 2009.