Right after her graduation, Sawyer went back to Kentucky and got a job as weather forecaster for the WLKY-TV news in Louisville. In Sawyer's opinion, the weather was boring, so she would add quotes every now and then to keep it interesting. Finally, Sawyer was promoted to general assignment, but this could not sustain her interest for long. In 1970, Sawyer moved to Washington D.C. and, unable to find work as a broadcast journalist, she made the rounds in government offices. She eventually found a job as an assistant to Jerry Warren, the White House deputy press secretary. She was at first assigned to write press releases and quickly graduated to more demanding tasks like drafting some of President Richard Nixon's public statements. In a few months, she was hired as administrative assistant to White House Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler and eventually to staff assistant for U.S. President Richard Nixon. Sawyer continued through Nixon's resignation from the presidency in 1974 and worked on the Nixon-Ford transition team in 1974–1975, after which she decamped with Nixon to California and helped him write his memoirs, published in 1978. She also helped prepare Nixon for his famous set of television interviews with journalist David Frost in 1977.

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. In 2005, Deep Throat was identified as W. Mark Felt, but prior to that, Rabbi Baruch Korff – a longtime Nixon confidant and defender known as "Nixon's rabbi" – said on his deathbed that he believed Sawyer was Deep Throat. Sawyer laughed it off, and she was one of six people to request and receive a public denial from Woodward.

When Sawyer came back to Washington D.C. in 1978, she joined CBS News as a general assignment reporter. She was promoted to political correspondent in February 1980; Sawyer became a fixture on the weekday broadcasts of Morning With Charles Kuralt. When CBS decided to expand its morning news show from sixty minutes to ninety minutes in 1981, they were looking for a co-anchor as well. So on May 13, 1981, the president of CBS News announced that Sawyer would be the new co-anchor; when she debuted on September 28, 1981, she put her own stamp on the broadcast. The ratings for the show were boosted upon Sawyer's arrival, but the improvement did not last and after Kuralt left the show, he was replaced by Bill Kurtis. The ratings slid and Sawyer asked to be reassigned.

In 1984, she became the first female correspondent on 60 Minutes, a CBS News investigative television newsmagazine. During Sawyer's five years with 60 Minutes, the program almost always ranked among the top five most-watched in the country.

In 1989, she moved to ABC News to co-anchor newsmagazine Primetime Live with Sam Donaldson. From 1998 to 2000, she co-anchored ABC's 20/20, also a newsmagazine, co-anchoring on Wednesdays with Donaldson and on Sundays with Barbara Walters.

In 1999, Sawyer returned to morning news as the co-anchor of GMA with Charles Gibson. The assignment was putatively temporary, but her success in the position, measured by a close in the gap with front-runner Today, NBC News's morning program, sustained her in the position far longer than anticipated. The GMA program has never regained the lost viewers, nor beaten its early morning competition since Joan Lunden retired after 17 years as co-host in 1997.

On September 2, 2009, Sawyer was announced as the successor to Gibson, who retired as ABC World News anchor on Friday, December 18, 2009. Sawyer left GMA on December 11, 2009, and was scheduled to become the ABC World News anchor in January 2010. However, on December 1, 2009, The New York Times reported that instead of moving to ABC World News in January 2010, Sawyer would start on December 21, 2009, three days after Gibson's departure. For over a year in 2010–2011, with Katie Couric then anchor of CBS News, two of the three network news anchors on broadcast television were women. Ratings initially rose 8% after Sawyer's first four weeks, averaging 8.8 million viewers. She signs off at the end of her nightly broadcast with "I'll see you right back here tomorrow night." The show, like its competitor evening newscasts, ended the year with ratings 14% below that of the preceding year. To this day in 2013, she is the anchor of ABC's flagship broadcast World News and the network's principal anchor for breaking news, election coverage, and special events.


Career timeline
1967–1970: WLKY-TV news and weather reporter
1970–1974: White House press aide
1974–1978: Literary assistant to former President Richard Nixon
1981–1984: CBS Morning News anchor
1984–1989: 60 Minutes correspondent
1989–1998, since 2000: Primetime Live co-anchor
1998–2000: 20/20 co-anchor
January 1999 – December 11, 2009: Good Morning America co-anchor
December 21, 2009 – present: ABC World News anchor