Anderson Cooper has many fine attributes. The gravitas associated with news anchoring is not among them.
CNN’s rising star exudes empathy in the right times and places. Nobody put his stamp on Hurricane Katrina coverage as personally as Cooper (except maybe Geraldo Rivera on Fox News. But that’s another story).
Cooper has an engaging presence on camera, appealing to the younger demographic. He’s approachable and has fun with offbeat stories.
Frankly, his promotion by CNN to figurehead of the network’s primetime programming may turn out be too much of a good thing. And I’m a Cooper fan.
The “anti-anchor,” who gained prominence for his ability to express emotion and challenge bureaucrats and elected officials onscreen, who is known for his hip, relaxed attitude and overall coolness, has been elevated to serious anchor duty by CNN in one of the more graceless corporate announcements in memory.
Aaron Brown was sacked by the company without even being mentioned by name in the announcement.
It was a nasty heave-ho in a business of nasty heave-hos. Frankly, I feel sorry for Brown. And I’m not a Brown fan.
Brown’s casual, muttering style was annoying on many occasions. He seemed to pile on the personal parenthetical remarks in inverse proportion to the importance of the news story. The more serious the news, the more conversational Brown got until it seemed he was playing to the gang down at the pub. Then, when he wanted to display his smarts, Brown paused, sucking in air through clenched teeth, letting us know he was mulling the finer points.
CNN president Jon Klein hasn’t been shy about praising Cooper as the flavor of the month. Klein previously hailed the Cooper-Brown styles as the “fire and ice” of the cable news network. He suggested the emotional Cooper and the cerebral Brown were both important. Increasingly, however, Klein has let interviewers know he thought Cooper was a breakout star, a hot personality whose sizzle the network could not ignore. That “Saturday Night Live” singled out Cooper for parodies reportedly helped convince the CNN executives that he was a pop-culture icon in the making.
Cooper gained prominence during the Katrina story when he nailed Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., on the air, four days after the storm.
He cut off her breezy compliments about the fine job the Federal Emergency Management Agency was doing in New Orleans, saying, “Excuse me, senator, I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. When they hear politicians thanking one another, it just kind of cuts them the wrong way right now because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. Do you get the anger that is out here?”
Bold TV, yes. But was it the birth of a lasting anchorman?
“Anderson Cooper 360” will occupy the 8-10 p.m. slot that Brown’s chummy “NewsNight” held for the past four years. According to Variety, “Over the past few weeks, Klein and Brown have discussed various other roles at the net, but those talks ended at an impasse.”
Brown and Cooper both worked at ABC News before moving to cable. Brown was a TV anchor in Seattle for years before becoming anchor of “ABC World News Tonight Saturday” and reporting for other ABC news programs. Cooper joined ABC from Channel One News in New York. but he’s best remembered as the host of the 2001 ABC reality series “The Mole.”
When he took on that role, some of us thought he had dashed any hopes of being taken seriously as a newsman. Silly us. The anchor of the future is the reality host of the recent past.
As the networks grope to redesign their newscasts for younger audiences following the Brokaw-Rather-Jennings era, the first marquee name is Anderson Cooper’s.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
