In the eye of the beholder.

I grew up with ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Ok, yes, for several years at the very beginning of my life there was another well-known anchorman, of which all I really remember is the day in kindergarten when a teacher asked us for whom our parents were going to be voting, to which I (confusing the two most commonly heard “c” names on the television, evenings in my house) responded with supreme confidence, “Walter Cronkite.” But after 1983, when he became sole anchor and I started to actually pay attention to the background noise that was the constant undercurrent of our family dinners, it was Peter Jennings. He was charming, handsome, and witty, as well as being incredibly intelligent, and persistent with—and unafraid to ask—the hard questions. He was the news, for me—and I took it for granted that he would always be there, keeping me company through dinner, wherever I went, for the rest of my life. With several moves across the country, Peter Jennings was a constant, a familiar face to rely on, so it was heartbreaking during early 2005 to watch his decline from lung cancer.

As a presence at our dinner table every night growing up, he seemed almost to become part of our family in a way that wasn’t really clear to me until the day we broke a long-standing family tradition. On our annual family vacation in Maine, one of the first things we do upon arrival at the cottage that my parents have rented every year of my life except one, is hide the single, small, rabbit-eared television, so that for two weeks, aside from the radio in the morning (and in more recent years, the internet via laptops and a USB-cell connection, which we tell ourselves is something entirely different), we are on not just a family, but a media, vacation. This persisted, even through years with summer Olympics, until 2005. On the evening of August 8th, one day after his death, ABC broadcast an hour-long tribute to Peter Jennings, for which we broke out the television, and my parents and I watched, and wept.

ABC went through several permutations of hosts after Jennings died, including the short-lived shared anchorship of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, which ended with Woodruff hospitalized for serious injuries suffered when his convoy in Iraq was hit by an IED, and Vargas stepping down to spend more time with her family. Eventually, Charles Gibson took over, and has been hosting since May 2006. Gibson is good: friendly and reassuring and authoritative, but somehow lacking the panache of Peter Jennings, the implicit confidence and utter imperturbability that comes from years spent reporting from the frontlines of the civil rights movements in the US and South Africa, from the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia, and from the all-too-frequent chaos of the Middle East.

I have seen Peter Jennings, and you, Charlie Gibson—while pleasant—are no Peter Jennings. But although I still miss him every evening at 6:30 when I turn on my TV, for the most part, I have come to terms with reality.

For the last several nights, however, ABC World News Tonight has had a new anchor: Diane Sawyer. (And on a side note, it used to be that when someone different was sitting in the usual seat, there would be an explanation like, “so-and-so filling in while Peter Jennings is on vacation,” or “reporting live from Jerusalem.” It was around the time that Jennings started getting sick that I noticed these explanations had disappeared. Probably, it was a policy change by the network. But now, every time a new host sits in, I get a sinking feeling. I hope you’re ok, Mr. Gibson.) (And on a side, side note, for those of you playing along at home, tonight the chair was filled by George Stephanopoulos.)

Oh, Diane Sawyer. You have been in the news world for 42 years. You co-host Good Morning America (admittedly, not necessarily the most bulldog of news organizations, but still reputable) and Primetime Live. You’ve done numerous remarkable interviews with incredible newsmakers. You are 63 years old.

You are entitled to a few wrinkles.

Instead, we are treated to soft-focus shots of Sawyer. She is a beautiful woman who—it’s plain to see even through the Vaseline-slicked lens they’re using to shoot her—looks remarkably young for her age. Is she really that concerned about well-earned crow’s feet and laugh lines that she cannot bear the thought of exposing them to a viewing audience? It can’t be a Network Policy about Women of a Certain Age, because immediately following Sawyer’s glowing, radiant visage, we were treated to harshly-lit, remarkably unflattering shots of Hilary Clinton with what appeared to be vast canyons carved into her cheeks and black abysses under her eyes, being interviewed by Martha Raddatz. Neither of them were smoothed into agelessness, and instead of being lit by, in Sawyer’s case, glowing candles, were exposed to the indignities of interrogation-intensity, down-lit fluorescents. I realize that youth and beauty are not necessarily seen as being incompatible with intelligence in the world of television journalism—just look at Maria Bartiromo, Lara Logan and Anne Curry—and I am thankful for that. But are they, instead, considered prerequisites? Youth and beauty, for women, have traditionally been equated in the world of entertainment, with power (or at least increased viewership) whereas signs of age, such as wrinkles and grey hair, have equated with authority for men. As anchorwoman of an evening news show, does Sawyer believe that showing her age would reduce her gravitas? Does she think that the viewers at home will associate a few lines not with hard-won experience, but with weakness or senility? Is she right?

Or is she just that vain?