When word leaked out Wednesday that Diane Sawyer would succeed retiring ABC Anchor Charlie Gibson as the network's nightly news anchor, one woman had particular reason to feel a profound -- if private -- sense of satisfaction.

In 1983, Christine Craft, then a 39-year-old news anchor, sued the Kansas City, Mo., station KMBC for breach of contract, charging she'd been demoted because, according to focus group research, she was "too old, too unattractive and wouldn't defer to men."

Despite winning two jury trials, Ms. Craft's case was overturned on appeal. While she continued working in television and radio, she eventually became a lawyer.

For Ms. Craft, news of Ms. Sawyer's anointment to the anchor chair felt especially sweet, not just because the longtime ABC broadcast journalist is a woman -- but because she is a woman who also happens to be 63 years old.

"It actually feels wonderful," said Ms. Craft in a phone interview from her law office in San Francisco. "She and I are almost the same age, and my first thought coming to work, ... some 30 years after my case was filed, was how much progress we've made."

Still, doesn't all the hoopla about Ms. Sawyer seem so ... 30 years ago?

It's a far different world since that day in 1976 when Barbara Walters became the first woman to co-anchor an evening newscast -- in a disastrous pairing with ABC's Harry Reasoner that lasted two years. Women have made tremendous gains in business, politics, even in combat -- indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that women are about to outnumber men in the workforce.

So the very fact that a woman's elevation to network news anchor was news feels almost quaint -- a relic, like big hair and "power suits" -- of the 1980s, when nightly shows helmed by Walter Cronkite and then Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and John Chancellor still dominated the media landscape.

While still profitable, these programs are by no means their companies' biggest revenue generators, now that news is available 24/7 on multiple media platforms. Stuffed with ads for prescription drugs, the network evening news shows have audiences that are older and less coveted by advertisers than the young, mostly female demographic of NBC's "Today," ABC's "Good Morning America" and CBS's "The Early Show."

"This [Ms. Sawyer's elevation] is just an announcement of a replaced voice in a sea of voices out there," says Bob Thompson, director of The Center for Popular Culture and Television at Syracuse University.

"There was a time when the evening news was the central event of the day. You had your morning paper, and during the day you had radio, and then, for everything that happened since you read the newspaper, the evening news was the central gathering place. Guys like Cronkite penetrated the culture like no one does today given all the voices that are out there."

Still, some women of a certain age were celebrating Ms. Sawyer's promotion amid the knowledge that two out of three evening anchors are women.

"It's always important the first time the glass ceiling is broken, but you need to have enough women going through that glass ceiling to make a difference -- otherwise the woman is always the anomaly," said Jeanne Clark, a Shadyside resident who once served as national spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women in the 1980s.

"Katie Couric was the token woman when she started anchoring the CBS Evening News a few years ago, but once you have more than one, it's not tokenism anymore," noted Marie Danzinger, director of the communications program at The Kennedy School at Harvard.

If anything, Ms. Sawyer's promotion is just the maturation of a process that began years ago, when baby boomer women began entering television in larger numbers, and now, by virtue of age and changing public mores, are reaping the benefits.

"Only now are women with important jobs in the media reaching the age one associates with older newscasters on the evening news," Ms. Danzinger said. "Diane Sawyer's been around forever, she's built up a credibility ... over time that does compare with Charlie Gibson or Peter Jennings."

Ms. Sawyer was passed over for the top anchor job twice before. The fact that she finally snagged it now may simply be a sign of the decline of network news, fretted Washington Post blogger Jeanne McManus.

"I think that anytime women outnumber men in a profession it's a sign that men have abandoned it because there's not enough money or prestige in it anymore," she wrote, noting that there are many more women in medical school these days -- but more men on Wall Street.

Ms. Danzinger, too, has her worries.

"The worst-case scenario for me is that Brian Williams will surge in the ratings, prompting naysayers to claim women can't do this, that the 'experiment' will have failed," she said. "It's a big burden for Diane Sawyer to try to avoid that, and Katie Couric has been quite brave, carrying on the way she has, given that she's third in the ratings."

Ms. Sawyer was an oddity among female television news reporters, recalled Ms. Clark, who worked with her on several stories in the 1980s.

"I remember [when] you got past the big hair and heavy makeup, she was really someone capable of being excited and enthusiastic, which seemed odd for network reporters back then, when everyone was trying to fulfill the image of the hard-nosed Brenda Starr girl reporter," Ms. Clark said.

Today, women are everywhere in television, both national and local. Indeed, anchoring broadcasts solo or in pairs is not unusual on local TV.

In Pittsburgh, Stephanie Watson has often anchored weekends solo on KDKA-TV since the departure of Don Cannon almost two years ago. From 2002-06, Wendy Bell and Kelly Frey were paired as the morning anchor team on WTAE, and Sheila Hyland was a solo anchor on WPGH's 10 p.m. news in its last waning days of independence before WPXI began producing the broadcast with its own personnel in 2006.

Still, local news stations across the country tend to adhere to the formula of pretty young woman anchor paired with older-and-wiser male anchor, noted Mr. Thompson.

Ms. Craft argues that nothing much has changed in local television news since her lawsuit, when it comes to attitudes toward older women, noting that the same Kansas City station she sued nearly 30 years ago -- under a different owner, Metromedia -- is currently battling a lawsuit filed by three women anchors and reporters for sex and age discrimination.

Two of the three plaintiffs are in their 50s, and the suit alleges that female anchors at the station are "oppressively criticized, targeted and harassed after they reach their 40s," and that male anchors are not subjected to the same treatment.

Lawyers at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, a Kansas City law firm representing Hearst-Argyle Corp., which now owns KMBC, could not be reached for comment. But a spokesman for the firm previously denied the allegations.

Ms. Craft's journey through the legal system was circuitous.

After her 1983 Title VII suit against Metromedia went to trial, a federal jury in Kansas City awarded her $500,000 in damages. A federal judge deemed the amount "excessive" and ordered a second trial, which she also won. Metromedia appealed and the 8th Circuit Court overturned the decision, claiming there was insufficient evidence of discrimination.

Ms. Craft appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied her petition. Ordinarily, four justices must vote yes for such petitions to be heard. Ms. Craft vividly remembers, though, a single sentence written by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- then the only woman on the high court -- accompanying the order. "Justice O'Connor wrote, 'I would have voted to hear this case.' That meant so much to me."

Still, Ms. Craft wonders what political skills Ms. Sawyer had to employ to survive and prevail in network news.

"I chose to rock the boat at a certain point, and she's not done that," Ms. Craft said. "I'm sure she's been in many situations where she had to bite her tongue, and thought, 'Ah, I could sue those creeps,' but didn't.

"For me, it was a battle that really had to be fought," she said. "I was told I didn't play dumb so I could make men seem smarter, but I didn't feel I should defer to a peer simply because of a difference in gender."