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Anderson Cooper

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Anderson Cooper
Anderson Cooper

Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967 in New York City, New York) is a television journalist currently working for the CNN television network. He anchors Anderson Cooper 360°, which since November 2, 2005, has aired from 10 p.m. to midnight Eastern Time. The program is normally broadcast live from New York City, except during Cooper's trips to news sites.

Contents

Background

Family

Cooper is the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist, designer, writer, and railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. By his mother, he is the great-great-great grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.

He is of mostly English, Irish, and Dutch ancestry. Cooper is also part Spanish, through his direct descent from the Union general Hugh Judson Kilpatrick and his second wife, Luisa Fernandez de Valdiviseo, who was a member of an Andalusian family that settled in Peru in the 17th century.

After a series of heart attacks, his father died while undergoing open heart surgery at the age of 50 on January 5, 1978. This is said to have affected the young Cooper "enormously." In retrospect, he has said, "I think I’m a lot like my father in several ways," including "that we look a lot alike and that we have a similar sense of humor and a love of storytelling." Cooper considers his father's book Families as "sort of a guide on [...] how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him."

Cooper's older brother, Carter, took his own life on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th floor terrace of Vanderbilt's New York City penthouse apartment. Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expresses her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the medical prescription drug Proventil. Carter's suicide is apparently what sparked Anderson to become a journalist:

"Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it’s something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can’t tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?"

Education

Cooper attended The Dalton School in New York City and was a child fashion model through his teen years. He was graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a BA in Political Science. While at Yale, Cooper was tapped into Manuscript Society, one of the senior secret societies on campus. After his first correspondence work in the early 1990s, he took a break from reporting and lived in Vietnam for a year, during which time he studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.

Television work

Channel One

After Cooper graduated from Yale University, he tried unsuccessfully to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones. He instead took a job as fact-checker for the much smaller Channel One, which produces a youth-oriented news program that is broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States.

After six months, Cooper decided that he wanted to switch to reporting, but

"figured if I told anyone, they wouldn't give me the chance [...] I quit my job and moved overseas and started shooting with my own video camera. I figured if I put myself in situations where there weren't many Americans around and I shot little stories, then I could sell them to Channel One. I wanted to make it impossible for them to not put me on air. [...] I had a friend of mine make a fake press pass on a Macintosh, and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government. I had met the person who was involved in the Burmese student movement in New York, and they gave me the name of a contact in a town in Western Thailand. So I found my way to this town that was like a Wild West border town, and I contacted the person and said I was a reporter. We met in an ice cream parlor, and then they agreed to take me in, and they smuggled me across the border into Burma."
After reporting from Burma, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year and then returned to filming stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Haunted by his brother's suicide, Anderson explains, "The only thing I really knew is that I was hurting and needed to go someplace where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside." Cooper describes himself as having become "fascinated with conflict" during this dangerous period of his life in which he was occasionally shot at. While "witnessing history" was an incentive for him to report from such locales,
"I also found that I felt that the molecules in the air were different. In all the places where there was conflict it was sort of a highly charged atmosphere and there was something about it that appealed to me. I found I was very interested in issues of survival and why some people survive and others don't. I wanted to see first-hand. I felt very comfortable in those places."

ABC

A pre-CNN Anderson Cooper says "talk to the hand".
Enlarge
A pre-CNN Anderson Cooper says "talk to the hand".
In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor of ABC World News Now. In 2000 he switched career paths, taking a job as the host of ABC's reality show The Mole:
"My last year at ABC, I was working overnights anchoring this newscast then during the day at 20/20. So I was sleeping in two- or four-hour shifts, and I was really tired and wanted a change. I wanted to clear my head and get out of news a little bit, and I was interested in reality TV—and it was interesting."
One executive publicly predicted his move to reality TV would mean the end of his career as a newscaster.

CNN

However, he left The Mole after its second season to return to broadcast news in 2001, now at CNN: "Two seasons was enough, and 9/11 happened, and I thought I needed to be getting back to news." His first position at CNN was to anchor alongside Paula Zahn on American Morning. In 2002 he became CNN's weekend prime time anchor. Since 2002, he has hosted CNN's New Year's Eve special from Times Square. On September 8, 2003 he was made anchor of Anderson Cooper 360°, a fast-paced weeknight news program.

Describing his philosophy as an anchor, Cooper has said:

"I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away, the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don't think the audience really buys that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don't buy it. I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don't know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don't know as long as you say you don't know it. I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem."
In January 2005, he was sent to South Asia to cover the tsunami damage. That same month, he also went to Baghdad, Iraq to cover the elections. In February and March 2005, he covered the Cedar Revolution in Beirut, Lebanon. In early April 2005, he reported from Rome, covering the death of Pope John Paul II, and from London, covering the royal wedding of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.

In July 2005, he covered Hurricane Dennis from Pensacola, yielding one of the most memorable bits of footage from that particular storm. He and John Zarella were standing outside a Ramada during the worst of the storm when a large metal sign blew down. During CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he confronted Sen. Mary Landrieu ([a video clip of the Landrieu interview]), Sen. Trent Lott, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson about their perception of the government response.

In September, 2005, the format of CNN's NewsNight was changed from 60 to 120 minutes to cover the unusually violent hurricane season; to help distribute some of the increased workload, Cooper was temporarily added as co-anchor to Aaron Brown. This arrangement was reported to have been made permanent the same month by the president of CNN's U.S. operations, Jonathan Klein, who has called Cooper "the anchorperson of the future."

Following the addition of Cooper, the ratings for NewsNight increased significantly; Klein remarked that "[Cooper's] name has been on the tip of everyone's tongue." To further capitalize on this, Klein announced a major programming shakeup on November 2, 2005. Cooper's 360° program would be expanded to 2 hours and shifted into the 10 p.m. ET slot formerly held by NewsNight, with the third hour of Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room filling in Cooper's former 7 p.m. ET slot. With "no options" left for him to host shows, Aaron Brown left CNN, ostensibly after having "mutually agreed" with Jonathan Klein on the matter.

Other work

Awards

CNN's biographical entry for Cooper lists the following awards:

Sexual orientation

Some in the gay community believe that Cooper's sexual orientation is an "open-secret" and want him to publicly 'come out'. It has been further claimed, e.g., on [blogACTIVE], that discussion of Cooper's sexuality is increasingly seen as a liability to his career and so is no longer acknowledged; "his handlers at CNN [are] known to call sites and ask editors to delete references to Anderson Cooper being gay." Blogger [Andy Towle] referred to Cooper as ["the most openly closeted gay man in America"] after reading a New York magazine article which reported on the matter as follows:

There has been a lot of chatter on the Internet about the fact that Cooper may or may not be gay, and Village Voice columnist Michael Musto has taken pleasure in quoting the gay magazine [Metrosource], which has referred to Cooper as "the openly gay news anchor." It has been assumed in certain circles in New York partly because he lives what looks to some to be a gay social life. He’s often seen at parties with Barry Diller, and he's friends with the lead singer from the outré gay rock band the Scissor Sisters. There was also a slightly heated interview last fall with Jerry Falwell about gay marriage. Some Cooper-obsessed bloggers insist that the anchor outed himself on the air, taking the gay side of the debate and saying, "We pay taxes." They claim CNN originally posted a [transcript] with the "we" and then later changed it to "You pay taxes."
In an interview with New York he said:

You know, I understand why people might be interested. But I just don’t talk about my personal life. It’s a decision I made a long time ago, before I ever even knew anyone would be interested in my personal life. The whole thing about being a reporter is that you're supposed to be an observer and to be able to adapt with any group you’re in, and I don’t want to do anything that threatens that.

Trivia

External links

Official sites

News and media

Profiles

Unofficial sites

 

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