For years, Sawyer seemed constitutionally ill-suited to the task. With her striking good looks (blonde, five-foot-nine, former beauty queen) and formidable résumé (Wellesley grad, former Nixon aide, CBS News Washington correspondent), she was perceived as intimidatingly glamorous and cerebral in the early eighties when she took over as co-anchor of the CBS morning news. In subsequent jobs (60 Minutes correspondent, anchor of ABC’s Primetime Live), Sawyer built a reputation for landing scoops—she scored a much-talked-about interview with Boris Yeltsin when Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted. The fact that she was one half of a media power couple whose other half was Mike Nichols didn’t make her any more cuddly.

Couric, on the other hand, was a natural from the moment she landed in the morning-anchor chair in 1991, having been handed the job in a desperate move by NBC in the wake of the disastrous firing of Jane Pauley and hiring of neophyte Deborah Norville. With her wisecracking manner and winning smile, Couric not only won over viewers but proved to be a surprisingly disarming and appealing interviewer. After giving birth to two daughters while host of Today, she bonded even more closely with her audience. “Katie was Everywoman, shopping at the mall and dyeing her own hair,” says Michael Bass, a former Today producer who now helms CBS’s The Early Show. “People felt she was their really close friend.”

From left, Good Morning America's Robin Roberts, Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer, and Tony Perkins.   (Photo: Chris Buck)

Recently, however, an almost eerie reversal has taken place. Sawyer is winning over Middle American moms while Couric is alienating them. The Ice Queen enthusiastically goofs around in stunts like dressing up in seventies finery and doing the Hustle and comfortably plays well with the other cast members. Age, normally death on television for a woman, works in her favor; Sawyer will turn 60 in December, and she and Gibson, who’s 62, joke frequently about their old-fogy status. It has the effect of humanizing her: What’s more charming to middle-aged women than a middle-aged woman who’s comfortable getting older in front of them? Far from being a news snob, Sawyer has proved to have “some of the most lowbrow taste of anyone you’d ever meet,” says Perkins. “She’ll be the one to say, ‘We should do a segment on fried Twinkies.’ ”

“Diane breaks the rules,” ABC News president David Westin says. “She’s elegant, and people know she’s married to Mike Nichols. Yet we’ve done research, you go and talk to women, and they feel they can identify with her.” While he’s on the subject, Westin can’t resist taking a shot at the competition. “Diane’s never had to overcome the girl-next-door cheerleader personality—that’s a tough piece of business. If that’s not such a plausible thing anymore, it’s hard to know where you go with that persona.”

Competitive motives aside, he’s right. Before viewers’ eyes, Couric has morphed from girl next door to fashionista, trading in tailored suits for leather jackets, donning what seems like a different pair of glasses every week, and switching hairstyles with Hillary Clinton–like zeal. When she went public in 2002 with the fact that she had arm-wrestled NBC into giving her a four-and-a-half-year, $65 million contract, Couric lost credibility with middle-class viewers (Sawyer doesn’t take in laundry to pay the bills but is discreet about her salary). “When you have a woman who is pushing 50 coming into your living room at 7 A.M. dressed in an extremely age-inappropriate manner and making ridiculous comments like, ‘Oh, $100 for a skirt, I can’t imagine paying that’—when everyone knows what she’s earning—it doesn’t sit well,” says a Today staffer.

It’s not just about the clothes and money; the Today studios are rife with reports of Couric’s ego raging unchecked. The dutiful Lauer arrives early to read up for interviews; Couric, reports co-workers, often flies in at the last minute unprepared, assuming she can fake it, presumably, on experience and charm. Some say she’s become an air hog. Whether it’s her doing or the producers’, Couric logged 4,826 minutes in 2004, doing interviews and feature segments in the 7-to-9 A.M. time slot, compared with Lauer’s 4,154 minutes, according to Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes TV-news content. That’s an eleven-hour difference in face time. (Sawyer and Gibson are virtually equally matched; in fact, he edges her by 38 minutes.)

Although Couric has suffered through two very public tragedies—her husband and sister both died of cancer—sympathy for her has waned, in part with the passage of time, in part because of her new image. Now it’s open season on her. The tabloids feature breathless gossip about her on-again, off-again romance with television executive and Boston Red Sox owner Tom Werner and her brief fling with a New York trumpet player.