“We killed them,” said an NBC exec on the blog TV Newser.

It looked like one more disappointment for ABC’s queen bee. Except—aha!—that crushing defeat was actually the product of a little clever ratings jujitsu that went unnoticed by almost everyone in TV news.

That day, a week before NBC announced it was laying off 700 employees, the network had pulled all its national advertising beginning at 7:26 a.m., sacrificing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nielsen Media Research, the company that measures ratings, only records data for programs that air national advertising. As a result, there is only ratings information from the beginning of the Today show, and none at all during the very time period when, a few channels away, Ms. Sawyer was mercilessly grilling the thirsty Aussie actor.

“We did not lose any money,” said Jim Bell, executive producer of the Today show.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” said an ABC executive. “You lose revenue or you lose editorial time down the road. Either way, you’re playing fast and loose.” NBC also uses the tactic against other programming.

It was one more bizarre episode in what has been a trying—and improbably triumphant—six months for Diane Sawyer.

After a protracted period of wavering, rumor and anticipation, she missed out on the full-scale game of musical anchor-chairs that happened this summer. Charlie Gibson went to World News Tonight, Katie Couric went to the CBS Evening News, Meredith Vieira went to Today—and Ms. Sawyer, the golden sphinx of ABC, stayed put.

And yet there she is! The old Diane Sawyer, after all that, is having an epic autumn for the news division. The big jobs—the Diane Sawyer–sized jobs—have passed by, but the big stories are there. And Ms. Sawyer has been getting them.

Beginning Oct. 17, she spent a productive week kicking around North Korea, filing dispatches for the morning and evening news shows, evaluating the nuclear threat, interrogating a general and an ambassador, and—as only Ms. Sawyer could—blogging. She filed Web dispatches from the bedroom of a young Korean figure skater and a nearby beauty parlor in which she noted the “smell of a permanent wave.”

She even got to show off her elevated standards, turning down the offer of an interview with JonBenét Ramsey non-killer John Mark Karr.

Then there was her troubled-actor twofer: Before Mr. Gibson, on Oct. 2 and 9, ABC aired the first and second halves of Ms. Sawyer’s exclusive interview with Robin Williams about his latest cartwheel off the wagon.

Ms. Sawyer took her post at Good Morning America in 1999, when she agreed to take a three-month stint as guest host and, like royalty in exile, never departed.

Ms. Sawyer’s next move may come on her own timetable. Back in May, when she removed herself—not entirely willingly—from the running for World News Tonight, ABC News president David Westin promised to work out an arrangement to her liking by January 2007, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. Since then, Ms. Sawyer has been more inscrutable than ever. Even her closest confidantes—even the leaky ones—claim to have no idea what’s on her mind.

“Diane is keeping her cards extremely close to the vest,” said one. “None of us has any idea what she plans to do.”

Ms. Sawyer’s lawyer, Alan Grubman, declined to comment about her plans, as did a spokesman for ABC News.

As of now, not all in the upper ranks of the news division expect that their star will continue with Good Morning America after spring, when two network sources said her obligations to the show expire. But Ms. Sawyer’s contract with the network—renegotiated in 2005—isn’t up for at least another two years, said two different sources who are familiar with the details.

If not GMA, what?

Several options, each unsatisfying in its own way, are kicking around the halls at 66th and Columbus:

Ms. Sawyer could probably have Nightline if she wants, even though it’s the one ABC News show with an audience (4.7 million, on average) that is actually growing. According to three sources in a reasonably good position to know—although when it comes to Ms. Sawyer, no one ever really knows—Mr. Westin offered her Nightline at least once before, when it became clear Mr. Gibson would get World News. Ms. Sawyer, the sources said, declined.

A second option is to make Ms. Sawyer a correspondent at large, filling in occasionally on Good Morning America and World News with Charles Gibson and otherwise devoting her energies to landing big interviews, conducting prime-time specials and making appearances with husband Mike Nichols at glamorous events around town. Her hefty salary—Ms. Sawyer is, according to one network source, making Katie-bank—might make this arrangement financially inexpedient for the network.

Lastly, there would be the Barbara Walters path, going unquietly into nonretirement. “Not Diane,” said one of her associates.

One thing in all of this is clear: ABC needs Ms. Sawyer, 61, to stay—if only because the network has no other stars with the presence and seniority to replace Charlie Gibson, 63, if for some reason he has to leave World News. The lessons of the past year have been many and rough for ABC News. Among them: When you have an aging star, you need a contingency plan.

“From Mel Gibson to North Korea, you know they’re just laying at her feet, hoping against hope that that’ll be the thing that gets her to stay at GMA,” said an executive at another broadcast network.

And if she doesn’t ….

First in line for the morning desk is Campbell Brown, the snappy brunette news junkie that NBC can no longer afford. Ms. Brown, who didn’t inherit Ms. Couric’s chair at the Today show, possesses both the news chops and a willingness to talk about her home life that make her an ideal candidate. ABC’s morning team has few members willing or able to talk about their spouses and children. Ms. Brown’s recent marriage to right-wing commentator Dan Senor would be a gift from the morning-show gods. Her contract is up next summer. ABC is in discussions.

Also liminally in the running are GMA Weekend Edition anchor Kate Snow, whose contract is also up soon, and former World News Tonight co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas, who—having been demoted and then having that demotion blamed on her pregnancy—would probably have a thing or two to tell the housewives of Middle America.

Yet those housewives are also one of Ms. Vargas’ main impediments: Good Morning America’s audience is 70 percent female, and among female viewers, Ms. Vargas is said internally to have “coldness issues.” As one network executive put it: “She doesn’t exactly exude warmth.”

What she does exude is competence. When she came to ABC a decade ago, Ms. Vargas was originally thought of as a possible successor to Joan Lunden on GMA. Only at the time, she tested poorly with morning audiences. But now, two pregnancies later, Ms. Vargas might be better suited for the bubbly dawn-time chitchat.

Whether there is an opening for her depends on the whims of Ms. Sawyer, a television personality whom one network executive called “a 61-year-old woman in search of a legacy.”

That executive is part of a school of Sawyer scholars who fantasize about a heroic surge for the anchor (there are plenty such people; most of them retired from TV news in the 1980’s). The Sawyerites sketch out versions of this scenario: Ms. Sawyer remains at the network past the end of her contract. Mr. Gibson does his work on World News and retires honorably sometime after the 2008 election. ABC, still as ever without a bench of possible replacements, turns once more to its queen. Ms. Sawyer alights, takes her throne and lives to trounce Katie Couric once and for all. It is all the more appealing because the final battle would occur during the serious nighttime hours, on traditionally male turf.

Presented with this version of events, an influential television source said: “So you’re just going to add to the speculative folklore of the travails of Ms. Sawyer? Why don’t you just ask her what she wants?”

Ms. Sawyer telephoned the afternoon of Oct. 30 and very politely declined an interview request.

Gravitas lurks at the heart of the concentric speculation about Katie Couric’s television future: Should she leave Today for the CBS Evening News? Should the Evening News want her to?

It’s one thing to be the most successful morning news anchor. Being an evening news anchor is something else—something more … grave? More Latinate?

Ms. Couric lacks it, by various accounts, because of her legs or her boyfriends or her perky giggle. An evening news anchor is a different kind of person than that.

“It is essentially a chauvinistic word,” Connie Chung said.

Ms. Chung was on the wrong end of gravitas in 1993, when CBS dropped her in to co-anchor the Evening News with Dan Rather, then yanked her out again two years later.

Delicacy prevented Ms. Chung, reached by the phone while vacationing in Boca Raton, Fla., from putting her anatomical definition of “gravitas” on the record.

“It is a posture,” she said instead. “They’re posturing.”

But it’s a posture that has worked. Industry types are vague about what constitutes gravitas, but an informal poll suggests it involves some combination of gray hair and a baritone voice. And that timbre of authority would rule out half the population.

“I have to say that I thought—in fact, I was so sure of my cocky little self, going back 10 years—I thought that by now there would be a sole female anchor of one of the network evening news shows,” said 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. “Not a partner, but a sole female anchor. Because I had assumed that we had arrived.”

In fact, for all the hubbub about Ms. Couric’s plans, there is already a solo female anchor: ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, left alone on the World News Tonight desk after the wounding of her co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, in Iraq. But Ms. Vargas is another in the long line of perceived anchor lites—and one scheduled to go out on maternity leave to boot.

Last summer, before Ms. Vargas was named co-anchor, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked a television executive if the candidate had what it took for the role. “I know this is going to sound really sexist,” he told Ms. Dowd, who wrote about the conversation in December, “but if there were another 9/11, I’m not sure if she has the gravitas to hold that anchor chair.”

“It’s one of those pop terms that’s thrown around, and nobody knows exactly what it means,” said Judy Woodruff, the former broadcast correspondent and CNN anchor, who now works for PBS. “To me, it means: Who do you believe when they tell you what is going on in the world?”

“I suppose people mean weight, seriousness, sobriety, authority,” said Geneva Overholser, a Washington-based newspaper columnist and an emerging member of the pro-Couric punditocracy. Ms Overholser did a short piece for NPR’s All Things Considered on March 24, defending Ms. Couric’s anchoring chops. When people use the word “gravitas,” she said by phone on March 27, “I think what they’re confusing it with is pomposity. This is the thing we make fun of in anchors.”

Ms. Chung likewise had disdain for the popular image of the Serious Anchorman. “I used to find that the three guys—you know, Peter and Tom and Dan—I found them to be caricatures of themselves,” she said. “The previous male anchors have been happy to live in straitjackets. They toe the network line. They will do only what is politically correct, what is politically appropriate, and I think women are more likely to span the horizon and look more openly at the vast array of stories out there. And I’m not, you know, chauvinistically female. I’m not a libber, a women’s libber, to any great extent.”

Although, come to think of it, Ms. Chung could do without the beloved baritone too: “Male voices are somewhat predictably boring,” she said. “They have a drone to them that I find less distinctive than women. I don’t know why. They just sound more like radiophones.”

But the industry doesn’t believe that other women share Ms. Chung’s preferences. The news divisions no longer ignore female audiences as they once did—in fact, programmers are deliberately pitching to women. A network executive with access to internal demographic research information explained that women watch more television than men, consume more media in general, and increasingly control the family purse strings.

Sisterhood, however, is not the answer.

“Women like to get their news from other women in the morning,” the executive said, “and from men—husband figures—at night.”

Thus the hubbub over Ms. Couric moving to the Man’s Hour—and the gnashing of teeth among industry women as they witness it.

Proving especially incendiary were the last lines of a recent column about Ms. Couric by David Carr in The Times: “[T]he fact that networks seem willing to concede that the best man for the job is clearly a woman means that it just isn’t the same job anymore.”

“That made me crazy,” Ms. Chung said. And yet it held a kernel of truth: “The news business is changing, so the importance of the evening news is diminished, so therefore it’s finally acceptable to people if it’s a woman who anchors. It’s really a shame, because I’d really love for it to be the same-thing level of prestige—but with a woman.”

Meanwhile, as Ms. Couric mulls her options, CBS has found the ultimate old-school paterfamilias in Bob Schieffer, and has ridden his version of the third-place Evening News to the broadcast’s highest ratings in months, and its closest competition with second-place World News Tonight in four years. For the week of March 20, CBS had 8.46 million viewers, ABC had 8.61 million, and NBC had 9.58 million.

Still, the women of the news industry held out hope that anchoring could transcend gender.

“Maybe the evening news is a separate little niche that I’m just not up on, but I don’t feel that women aren’t out there with gravitas,” Ms. Stahl said.

“If we had another—God forbid—another 9/11,” said Ms. Woodruff, “there are men that some people would not want to hear the news from. There are a number of women who are well qualified to report on the big most momentous news stories of our day, just as there are a number of men who are qualified.

“I think it’s an old-fashioned idea to think that people are just not prepared to accept important news from a woman.”

Gravitas lurks at the heart of the concentric speculation about Katie Couric’s television future: Should she leave Today for the CBS Evening News? Should the Evening News want her to?

It’s one thing to be the most successful morning news anchor. Being an evening news anchor is something else—something more … grave? More Latinate?

Ms. Couric lacks it, by various accounts, because of her legs or her boyfriends or her perky giggle. An evening news anchor is a different kind of person than that.

“It is essentially a chauvinistic word,” Connie Chung said.

Ms. Chung was on the wrong end of gravitas in 1993, when CBS dropped her in to co-anchor the Evening News with Dan Rather, then yanked her out again two years later.

Delicacy prevented Ms. Chung, reached by the phone while vacationing in Boca Raton, Fla., from putting her anatomical definition of “gravitas” on the record.

“It is a posture,” she said instead. “They’re posturing.”

But it’s a posture that has worked. Industry types are vague about what constitutes gravitas, but an informal poll suggests it involves some combination of gray hair and a baritone voice. And that timbre of authority would rule out half the population.

“I have to say that I thought—in fact, I was so sure of my cocky little self, going back 10 years—I thought that by now there would be a sole female anchor of one of the network evening news shows,” said 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. “Not a partner, but a sole female anchor. Because I had assumed that we had arrived.”

In fact, for all the hubbub about Ms. Couric’s plans, there is already a solo female anchor: ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, left alone on the World News Tonight desk after the wounding of her co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, in Iraq. But Ms. Vargas is another in the long line of perceived anchor lites—and one scheduled to go out on maternity leave to boot.

Last summer, before Ms. Vargas was named co-anchor, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked a television executive if the candidate had what it took for the role. “I know this is going to sound really sexist,” he told Ms. Dowd, who wrote about the conversation in December, “but if there were another 9/11, I’m not sure if she has the gravitas to hold that anchor chair.”

“It’s one of those pop terms that’s thrown around, and nobody knows exactly what it means,” said Judy Woodruff, the former broadcast correspondent and CNN anchor, who now works for PBS. “To me, it means: Who do you believe when they tell you what is going on in the world?”

“I suppose people mean weight, seriousness, sobriety, authority,” said Geneva Overholser, a Washington-based newspaper columnist and an emerging member of the pro-Couric punditocracy. Ms Overholser did a short piece for NPR’s All Things Considered on March 24, defending Ms. Couric’s anchoring chops. When people use the word “gravitas,” she said by phone on March 27, “I think what they’re confusing it with is pomposity. This is the thing we make fun of in anchors.”

Ms. Chung likewise had disdain for the popular image of the Serious Anchorman. “I used to find that the three guys—you know, Peter and Tom and Dan—I found them to be caricatures of themselves,” she said. “The previous male anchors have been happy to live in straitjackets. They toe the network line. They will do only what is politically correct, what is politically appropriate, and I think women are more likely to span the horizon and look more openly at the vast array of stories out there. And I’m not, you know, chauvinistically female. I’m not a libber, a women’s libber, to any great extent.”

Although, come to think of it, Ms. Chung could do without the beloved baritone too: “Male voices are somewhat predictably boring,” she said. “They have a drone to them that I find less distinctive than women. I don’t know why. They just sound more like radiophones.”

But the industry doesn’t believe that other women share Ms. Chung’s preferences. The news divisions no longer ignore female audiences as they once did—in fact, programmers are deliberately pitching to women. A network executive with access to internal demographic research information explained that women watch more television than men, consume more media in general, and increasingly control the family purse strings.

Sisterhood, however, is not the answer.

“Women like to get their news from other women in the morning,” the executive said, “and from men—husband figures—at night.”

Thus the hubbub over Ms. Couric moving to the Man’s Hour—and the gnashing of teeth among industry women as they witness it.

Proving especially incendiary were the last lines of a recent column about Ms. Couric by David Carr in The Times: “[T]he fact that networks seem willing to concede that the best man for the job is clearly a woman means that it just isn’t the same job anymore.”

“That made me crazy,” Ms. Chung said. And yet it held a kernel of truth: “The news business is changing, so the importance of the evening news is diminished, so therefore it’s finally acceptable to people if it’s a woman who anchors. It’s really a shame, because I’d really love for it to be the same-thing level of prestige—but with a woman.”

Meanwhile, as Ms. Couric mulls her options, CBS has found the ultimate old-school paterfamilias in Bob Schieffer, and has ridden his version of the third-place Evening News to the broadcast’s highest ratings in months, and its closest competition with second-place World News Tonight in four years. For the week of March 20, CBS had 8.46 million viewers, ABC had 8.61 million, and NBC had 9.58 million.

Still, the women of the news industry held out hope that anchoring could transcend gender.

“Maybe the evening news is a separate little niche that I’m just not up on, but I don’t feel that women aren’t out there with gravitas,” Ms. Stahl said.

“If we had another—God forbid—another 9/11,” said Ms. Woodruff, “there are men that some people would not want to hear the news from. There are a number of women who are well qualified to report on the big most momentous news stories of our day, just as there are a number of men who are qualified.

“I think it’s an old-fashioned idea to think that people are just not prepared to accept important news from a woman.”

Now, two months later, Mr. Westin’s vision for the future is on indefinite hold. Mr. Woodruff, badly wounded on assignment in Iraq, is out, with no timetable for his return. And Ms. Vargas announced last week that she is pregnant, which would largely rule out roving assignments through the summer.

The network is sticking with its forward-looking message: “We are continuing down the road of the plan that we had,” said World News Tonight executive producer Jon Banner.

But it’s hard to have a two-roving-anchor format without two roving anchors.

And so, a mere 72 days after Mr. Woodruff and Ms. Vargas were to have inaugurated two decades of stability and vitality at the network, ABC’s news programs are leaning again on the old-line talent—the reliable broadcasters of yesteryear. Good Morning America anchors Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson, 60 and 62, respectively, are gamely filling in for Mr. Woodruff on World News Tonight. Picking up their slack on the morning show will be Barbara Walters, 74.

“It is classic non-decision decision-making,” said an executive from another network, who sympathized with the challenges—both business and personal—that Mr. Westin faces in managing this situation. “The logical permanent solution is to go back to Charlie [Gibson],” the executive continued, “but no, not really, that’s not right …. The logical solution is to give it to Vargas solo …. Well, I guess there is no logical solution.”

“The fact of the matter is, we still have all these responsibilities to our broadcast,” said Mr. Banner. “We still have to do the West Coast feed. We still have to do the 3 o’clock Webcast. And we still want the flexibility to travel one of our anchors. There’s still enough work for two people. Just because Bob got hurt, that doesn’t mean the responsibility stops.”

On Wednesday, Feb. 15, Ms. Walters is scheduled to guest-host GMA—a familiar time slot for the veteran journalist, who anchored the Today show in the 1960’s—and Ms. Sawyer will make her debut opposite Ms. Vargas on World News Tonight. This will be the first time that two women co-anchor an evening newscast, but it’s not the way that ABC News hoped to make history.

In addition to coping with the shock of the injuries to Mr. Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, news executives are contending with a recent round of budget cuts, brought on in part by a failure of many shows to meet ratings targets, according to multiple network sources.

In a series of budget meetings over the past several weeks, executives and senior producers for Good Morning America and Nightline, in particular, have been asked to make significant cutbacks, the sources said.

“We’re always reviewing the budget, because we always face unexpected news events,” said an ABC spokesperson. “Resources get shifted around to cover those and allow for increased investment in different areas.”

And though Nightline has managed to hold onto its Ted Koppel–era ratings, the show’s staff is continuing its steady post-Koppel exodus, with one Washington-based producer leaving every few weeks or months. They are headed to Al Jazeera International—where television producers can do serious international news for a salary commensurate with broadcast news—or to National Public Radio, where television producers can do serious international news for a whole lot less.

Former Nightline correspondent Dave Marash is now the Washington anchor of Al Jazeera International, and several more staffers—most recently, producer Joanne Levine—have joined him there. Mr. Koppel and correspondent Michel Martin have both made their way to NPR, and plenty of others at ABC still hope to make the switch, according to multiple sources at the network.

“To people, it may seem like I went over there and shopped,” said Jay Kernis, NPR’s senior vice president for programming. But Mr. Kernis added that he didn’t deliberately raid ABC.

Still, at a full-staff meeting last week, according to one person in attendance, Mr. Kernis announced that he had selected William Marimow to be the station’s vice president of news after a long interview process—during which, Mr. Kernis said, he “pretty much met everyone who works at Nightline.”

(“I did say that,” Mr. Kernis said, “but that’s because I was talking to a room full of 200 serious NPR journalists, with another 100 people listening in via satellite or telephone, and I really wanted a laugh.”)

Morale elsewhere at ABC, even at World News, remains steady, Mr. Banner said. So do the ratings, which move glacially (if not slower) for evening-news broadcasts.

“I’m not expecting anything to drastically change,” he said. “There’s a lot of instability in the evening-news day part anyway. Brian [Williams, anchor of NBC’s Nightly News] has just started to solidify and come into his own. [Bob] Schieffer is or is not a short-timer at CBS. We have a plan. We believe that plan will work, and we’re going to stick to it.”

Alexis Glick, the all-American NBC correspondent who once seemed positioned to inherit Katie Couric’s anchor chair, has been moved off the Today show and thereby out of contention for its throne, according to three sources at the network.

While her colleagues schlepped around Turin to attend maximum-security parties at NBC’s lavish compound and fawn over the scenery, Ms. Glick cleared off her desk last week and shuffled out the door of 30 Rock.

Speculation favored her re-emergence at CNBC, where she began her television career as a trading correspondent.

“This is another case where they build up somebody in the press, make them believe they’re the next big thing, and then cut them off at the knees,” said one NBC source.

Before becoming a television correspondent, Ms. Glick worked in finance. A graduate of Columbia University, she began her career as an analyst for Goldman Sachs and worked her way up to head of New York Stock Exchange floor operations for Morgan Stanley, which, according to her NBC bio, made her the “first woman to manage a Floor Operation for a bulge bracket firm.”

Apparently, success in dawn-time television requires something more than brains and capitalist spunk.

The NBC sources said that another Today show benchwarmer, Natalie Morales, is becoming a full-time correspondent for the show.

A frequent contributor to the morning show’s third hour, Ms. Morales may be the next likely successor to Ms. Couric or headline-reader Ann Curry, the sources said.

Ms. Glick couldn’t be reached for comment. Ms. Morales is in Turin, where Ms. Couric, who was edged out of hosting the opening ceremonies by Brian Williams, has found at least one opportunity to throw her a loving elbow.

On Feb. 9, Ms. Morales was reporting from the tiny resort village of Sestriere, the site of all the Olympic skiing events. After a thorough piece detailing the quality of the competition and the depth of the powder, Ms. Morales kicked it back to Ms. Couric and co-host Matt Lauer.

“Looks beautiful up there,” said Ms. Couric.

“Yeah, it’s pretty,” said Mr. Lauer.

“The mountains, too,” said Ms. Couric.

“Ha ha,” said Mr. Lauer.

“That was a compliment to Natalie,” said Ms. Couric.

And, for Ms. Morales, a little glimpse of what’s to come.

With her almond-hued hair in a wild, off-air frizz, Ms. Vargas was curled up in an easy chair in her dimly lit office, where she was considering the utter maleness of network anchordom. She was contemplating the rotating list of dudes offered as replacements for CBS News anchor Dan Rather, while Brian Williams settled his taut young haunches into Tom Brokaw's comfy old chair at NBC News and Peter Jennings played out his long stay at her network, ABC. It was a rainy Monday evening, Dec. 6, and Ms. Vargas had a cold, sniffling a little, her hands cupping a coffee mug with Adaptation-last year's Meryl Streep movie-printed on it, a burgundy lipstick smear on the rim.

"I'm amazed at how few times a woman's name is mentioned," she said. "I'm amazed that Diane's name is the only one mentioned." She meant Diane Sawyer. "And yet, any male reporter-'Oh yeah, he was on, I think, once.' And it's like: Wow, what happened to all of these award-winning women who've been anchoring network shows on other time periods successfully for years and years and years? I don't get it."

Ms. Vargas said that she hadn't been phoned herself by CBS president Leslie Moonves. "I think they're too busy calling Diane Sawyer," she said. "Listen, I'm under contract, so even if they did call-I'm not available!"

In September, Ms. Vargas was cast as the replacement for ABC News' grand dame, Barbara Walters, on 20/20, taking the seat to the left of the vociferous John Stossel. On the air, Ms. Vargas is more in the Diane Sawyer mold than the Barbara Walters mold. She is tough, sexy, sharp and unmistakably a star. Hardballs have the sting of Sharon Stone, softballs have the comfort of Sally Field. Ms. Vargas is a warm Latina in a world of icy blondes and sultry sharks. And once you've established her reporter's bona fides, it's also probably not unfair-after reading hundreds of acres of copy on Brian Williams' Midwestern beauty-to note that she has the best lips in TV news, the kind that have you staring at them to see what might come out of them.

Monday evening, up to her chin in a woolen, olive-drab turtleneck, Ms. Vargas said she was determined to see a female network anchor in her lifetime. Of course, there was one once at ABC News, and her name was Barbara Walters.

But Ms. Vargas has already come up as a future replacement for Mr. Jennings should he decide to depart someday. And though Ms. Vargas was happily ensconced at 20/20 and reluctant to entertain thoughts of Mr. Jennings' bon voyage-he's a still-young 66-she was forthright: "When Peter decides he's had enough," she said, "I hope a woman will be considered for that position, whether it be me or Diane or somebody at this network who we don't know yet, or Katie. I really hope that executives at CBS are seriously considering a woman. I think it's due."

Asked directly whether he could envision Ms. Vargas anchoring one day, ABC News president David Westin said through a spokesperson, "Absolutely."

"We are very happy that Peter Jennings is firmly in place at the helm of World News Tonight for a long time to come," he said through the spokesperson. "Nevertheless, we are fortunate to have any number of talented women who are experienced anchors in their own right, like Diane Sawyer and Elizabeth Vargas, among others. As you know, Elizabeth subs for Peter often, and I wouldn't put her in that position unless I had enormous confidence in her abilities and future."

Ms. Vargas' profile has certainly been edging above the radar in recent months, as she's reported on the facts and fictions behind The Da Vinci Code and scored an exclusive with Cat Stevens after his airport fiasco. On Nov. 26, she deconstructed the Matthew Shepard murder case, dissecting its muck of crystal-meth and sexual issues, eliciting confessions from the convicted murderers and their associates, and turning the story on its ear: Maybe it wasn't a gay hate crime after all, she concluded, but a more ambiguous, crystal-meth-fueled act committed by sexually experimental youth. It earned her the enmity of some in the gay community. It also got terrific ratings, eight million viewers.

On Dec. 3, former Laramie police chief Dave O'Malley, who appeared in the segment, complained that he'd been lied to by Ms. Vargas about the nature of her story. He told a local newspaper in Laramie that after Ms. Vargas and the ABC News crew departed, he discovered e-mails they'd left behind describing "their preconceived focus that this was not a hate crime. This was a drug crime. That's what they went with."

Ms. Vargas denied that. "He was not lied to," she said. "Look, we take great issue with that and we're drafting a response." She said she felt secure about her approach. "My executive producer was gay," she said. "David Sloan, my executive producer, is quite active within the gay community. He's won GLAAD awards in the past." Nevertheless, GLAAD-the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation-issued a criticism of the segment, lambasting the credibility of the interview subjects, especially killer Aaron McKinney.

Ms. Vargas said she wasn't as interested in the kind of celebrity interviews Ms. Walters conducted. But Ms. Vargas gave her credit for a broader journalistic career. "Listen, Barbara Walters specialized in newsmaker interviews," she said. "Let's not forget all the world leaders she grilled. Let's not forget Fidel Castro and even Monica Lewinsky, as salacious a topic as that was." But Ms. Vargas said she herself preferred live, breaking news. She has acted as a fill-in for Mr. Jennings on a number of occasions, as third-string evening anchor behind Charlie Gibson. On Sept. 11, 2001, she took over for Mr. Jennings at 2 a.m. after his 17-hour stretch on the air.

"I'm very small and Peter's very tall," she said, "and I was sitting in the chair and it was hiked all the way down, and basically I looked like a little girl coming in on Take Your Daughters to Work Day." The weight of Mr. Jennings' authority, she said, was palpable. "When you're filling in for Peter, you feel a responsibility of living up to what a great job he does."

After Ms. Walters announced that she would retire from 20/20, Mr. Stossel told NYTV in February 2004, "She's going to be around until September," referring to Ms. Walters. "After that, I want to do the show by myself." It didn't happen that way. Instead, ABC News president David Westin appointed Ms. Vargas to co-host.

When the announcement came, Mr. Stossel gave her a hug.

"We get along great," she said. "We always have. We have actually socialized with them. I love his wife. If he really wanted that show all to himself and is mad that he didn't get it all to himself, he's been gentlemanly enough to keep it from me."

Ms. Vargas lives on the Upper West Side with her husband, the singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, who won a Grammy Award and had a radio hit, "Walking in Memphis," in 1991. She grew up an Army brat living primarily in Europe, without a television, and transferred an early passion for radio into a TV career starting in 1984. She bounced around to various affiliates until 1996, working on an NBC News magazine called The Now Show, hosted by Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric. NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker was the executive producer. "I had a lot to learn, and he took me under his wing and taught me," she said.

Being a female who wants respect and authority in TV news is complicated, and Ms. Vargas knows something about that. On her door, she had a typewritten quote from Hunter S. Thompson, describing the TV business as "a cruel and shallow money trench … a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs."

"And that's on a good day," she said, laughing.

Ms. Vargas said she had been sexually harassed early in her career.

"It happened to me once in my career, and it happened to someone above me, and I was mortified," she recalled. "And scared to death. Because if you don't carefully, carefully, carefully handle it just the right way, you're doomed."

Ms. Vargas said she hadn't been convinced either way on the sexual-harassment case brought against Bill O'Reilly by former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris. "I just remember reading about the whole thing and feeling like either she's a tremendously unattractive person or she's being incredibly wronged by a slam campaign, and it just made me want to take a shower every time I read an article," she said. "But again, I have to say, I interviewed Bill twice on GMA. I've been on his show. Maybe it was aberrant, weird behavior-I don't know."

The secret weapon of the female anchor has long been the dramatic sit-down interview confrontation: 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl is able to abruptly crank up her bewitching, whiplash "C'mon, mister, don't bullshit me" smile, while Ms. Sawyer has the ability to suddenly project the moral judgment of the viewer onto the interviewee.

Ms. Vargas, on the other hand, stressed the importance of staying detached. "The whole key is, when you're doing your job-and a tip to people being interviewed-don't take it personally," said Ms. Vargas. "When you're really angry, you stop thinking clearly.

"You're not going to ask somebody like a Judy Shepard a horrible, mean question-why would you? She is the mother of a murder victim," she continued. But an N.B.A. players' representative defending a soft penalty for a player accused of rape? "'Excuse me? What kind of penalty is a three-game suspension for raping a girl? Gimme a break! That's like pocket change, that penalty!' So then you can get more outraged. But you can never, ever feel it personally, because then you're not doing your job well."

Ms. Vargas said she "was hoping to get Condoleezza Rice as a profile, because I think she's fascinating. Still hoping." The country had already gotten its second female Secretary of State, so why wasn't ABC News getting its second female anchor? "We trust Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric to give us the news in the morning," said Ms. Vargas. "They are the queens of television in the morning …. They land all the biggest interviews and interview all the world leaders and they do it really well-so why can't they do it at 6:30?"