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Sawyer resists dwelling on such personal matters: it pains her that her journalistic accomplishments are overshadowed by questions about her looks, marriage and glamorous life-style. "We're a Madison Avenue country," she sighs. "I'm not sure that we make a distinction between newspeople and celebrities. And I think there is a distinction. The distinction lies in what you do every day -- what you do to get stories and how far you will go and how much you will dig for them. All of the rest of the attention that comes to you because you're on the air seems to me an irrelevance."
It is no irrelevance, however, to the executives who pay Sawyer and her fellow news stars million-dollar salaries and bet entire prime-time shows on them. Nor is it an irrelevance to the audience that tunes in, not to watch the nbc Nightly News or a new show called Prime Time Live, but to see Tom Brokaw or Diane Sawyer or Connie Chung. This is perhaps the ultimate irony of TV news in the celebrity age: reporters spend their careers trying to become stars, only to lament, once they make it, that they are treated as stars rather than reporters. The complaint may actually be sincere, but it almost doesn't matter. It's good for the image.
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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Cynthia Davis
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