Anderson Cooper: Encyclopedia II - Anderson Cooper - Television work

Anderson Cooper - Television work

Anderson Cooper - Channel One

After Cooper graduated from Yale, he tried unsuccessfully to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones, so instead took a job as fact-checker for the much smaller Channel One, which produced an MTV-style news program that was broadcast to many 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 half a year and then returned to filing stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Haunted by his brother's suicide, "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."

Anderson Cooper - ABC

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.

Anderson Cooper - 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 audiences 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.

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 AC360 program would be expanded to 2 hours and shifted into the 10pm ET slot formerly held by NewsNight, with the third hour of Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room filling in Cooper's former 7pm 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Television work", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki