Method anchor

Star newsman Anderson Cooper is defined less by his experience than by an old-fashioned Hollywood marketing campaign.

By Neal Gabler

Read more: CNN, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment TV Features

Aug. 23, 2006 | The phenomenon that is Anderson Cooper stared soulfully with his limpid blue eyes from the June cover of Vanity Fair, thus creating two journalistic disjunctions -- the fact that he is staring soulfully when any other news anchor would have a cool, imperturbable gaze, and the fact that he is a phenomenon who makes the cover of Vanity Fair.

It is easy to make fun of Anderson Cooper, CNN's sleek, prematurely gray-haired poster boy and the star of its nightly two-hour program, "Anderson Cooper 360." The main knock against him is that he seems created out of whole cloth by a P.R. machine the way the old Hollywood studios once created stars through media campaigns -- an assertion that is hard to challenge since Cooper's face seems to be everywhere these days: not only on Vanity Fair and on billboards but on "Oprah," "The Daily Show," "Late Night With David Letterman," "The Tonight Show" and soon on "60 Minutes" where Cooper will be a correspondent. People magazine has named him one of its sexiest men, there is an "Anderson for President" poster for sale on the Internet, countless fan sites are devoted to him, and gossip sites record his every move. Walter Cronkite never did a fashion spread as Cooper has done in Details. Added to all this attention is the frisson of his sexuality and the hanging question -- hanging because Cooper refuses to address it -- of whether he is gay or not, which raises the possibility of his being America's first gay anchor. CNN obviously has invested a great deal in its new wonder boy, and the network has been marketing him aggressively, though no more so than CBS is marketing its new anchor, Katie Couric. In doing so, however, CNN is not just boosting an anchor. It is changing the very paradigm of television news.

Network anchors traditionally have been fellows who have earned their spurs. They worked their way up through the ranks, covering politics, wars and the White House, gaining seasoning and authority. The Murrow generation, out of which came Cronkite, the old anchor paradigm, was annealed by World War II, but even its successors -- Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings -- were newsmen with experience. Rather burst on the national scene covering the Kennedy assassination, and he did duty in Vietnam and as CBS White House correspondent during Watergate, leading to his famous confrontations with President Nixon, before he assumed the anchor chair. Brokaw toiled in local news in Iowa and Nebraska before becoming a local anchor in Atlanta and Los Angeles and then an NBC correspondent, pulling White House duty during Watergate just as Rather did. Jennings worked at the CBC and then CTV in his native Canada as parliamentary correspondent before joining ABC as an anchor (briefly at age 27), and then, when ABC realized that he was too green, he left to become a foreign correspondent, opening the network's Middle East bureau and serving as its chief for seven years. These men were not just pretty faces or good teleprompter readers. (Rather, in fact, was execrable at reading the prompter, and Brokaw famously swallowed his "l's.") The implicit idea behind them was that the news was a public trust, both in the sense that a network produced the news for the public good and in the sense that it needed individuals who had enough credibility they could be trusted.

And so it was, right up through Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson. Despite his relative youth at 39, Anderson Cooper is not exactly a novice, as his recent bestseller, "Dispatches From the Edge," is designed to demonstrate, nor is he just a pretty face. He has been in the field. After graduating from Yale, he landed a job as a researcher at Channel One, the teen-oriented network that is beamed directly into middle schools and high schools, then, after six months, he decided he would rather see the world and became a one-man television crew, visiting war zones like Rwanda and Myanmar and sending back video dispatches to his old company on an on-again, off-again basis for roughly five years, including a year he spent in Vietnam learning the language -- a far cry from on-deadline reports of most broadcast journalists. He eventually landed a job as a newsreader at ABC, then as host of the reality show "The Mole," and then migrated to CNN, where he has acquitted himself as something more than an airhead. But even so, this is not exactly the résumé of an anchorman, hoisting his way rung by rung and assignment by assignment up the ladder, which is precisely the point. Cooper was a free agent -- the journalistic equivalent of a soldier of fortune. He was a lone operator and a swashbuckler with boyish élan who worked on his own schedule and on his own terms. The news wasn't a trust for Anderson Cooper. It was an adventure.

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