NEW YORK — Friday's "20/20" finds Diane Sawyer in starkly different environs than the cheerily lighted Times Square studio she occupies each morning as co-host of "Good Morning America."
In her latest ABC prime-time special, which examines poverty in Appalachia, Sawyer is scrubbed free of the glamour of morning television. Donning blue jeans, her normally coiffed hair pulled back in a ponytail, the anchor visits the deepest recesses of the mountainous region: the hillside trailer homes, the weathered front porches, the dank tunnels of a coal mine.
For Sawyer, it is not unfamiliar turf. She was born in Glasgow, Ky., and her family's ties to Appalachia stretch back decades.
"You don't have to go many generations back before we were up there fighting our way through those passes and trying to make our way down the mountain like everybody else," said Sawyer, who covered the region as a young Louisville television reporter in the late 1960s. "I'm always so moved by the bravery and the vitality of these essential American fighters. And now they've got a battle that they aren't winning."
"A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains" is the latest in a series of prime-time specials about poverty Sawyer has done in the last several years, including a 2007 piece that profiled the lives of children in Camden, N.J.
"It gets me up in the morning," she said of the documentaries, sitting in her cozy corner office at ABC on a recent afternoon, a flock of gilded Emmys perched on her desk. She jumped up to show a reporter the grinning school photo of one of the boys from the Camden special pinned to the wall, along with two colorful pieces of artwork he made for her.
Sawyer said she has not tired yet of "GMA," even after a decade of rising before dawn. But to do the morning program, she said, she needs an outlet for more substantial fare.
"This is what I think of as my life's work," she said. "I just feel hope when I do them, because we can do something about this. I can't do anything about government stimulus for banks' toxic assets -- even if I understood it, I couldn't do anything about it. But this I can do something about."
And it's not something the network would begrudge Sawyer, who remains one of ABC's most bankable stars. Since "Primetime," the news magazine she has co-anchored for 20 years, no longer has a regular time slot, Sawyer's recent specials have aired on "20/20," the longtime home of Barbara Walters, who had Sawyer on "The View" on Monday to promote her latest piece.
