Anderson Cooper
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| Born: | June 3, 1967 New York City, New York, USA |
|---|---|
| Occupation: | TV journalist, anchor, actor, child fashion model
<tr><th style="text-align: right;">Website:</th><td>CNN: Anchors & Reporters: Anderson Cooper</td></tr> |
Anderson Hayes Cooper (born June 3, 1967) 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.
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[edit] Background
[edit] Family
Cooper, who was born in New York City, is the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist, designer, writer, and railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. By his mother, he is a great-great-great-grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.
He is of mostly English, Irish, and Dutch ancestry. Cooper is also of Spanish heritage, through his great-great-grandmother Luisa Fernández de Valdivieso, whose family had settled in Peru in the 17th century. She was the second wife of Cooper's great-great-grandfather Union general Hugh Judson Kilpatrick.
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."<ref name="Van Meter">Van Meter, Johnathan (2005/09/19). Unanchored. New york Magazine, Retrieved 09/27/2006, from http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/14301/index.html</ref>
Cooper's older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide 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?"<ref name="Van Meter"/>
Cooper also has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski (a.k.a. Stan, born 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (born 1952), the latter of whom has been estranged from the family since the mid 1970s. They are the product of Gloria Vanderbilt's ten-year marriage to the conductor Leopold Stokowski.
[edit] Education
Cooper graduated from The Dalton School in New York City in 1984. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a BA in Political Science. He also interned at the Central Intelligence Agency, but opted to pursue a career in journalism rather than stay with the agency after school.<ref>Bercovici, Jeff (2006/09/06). Anderson cooper's CIA secret. Radar, Retrieved 09/26/2006, from http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2006/09/anderson-coopers-cia-secret.php</ref> 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.
[edit] Television work
[edit] 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."<ref name="Hirschman">Hirschman, David S. (2006/05/11). So what do you do, anderson cooper?. Mediabistro, Retrieved 09/26/2006, from http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a1582.asp</ref>
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."<ref name="Hirschman"/>
[edit] ABC
In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor of 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."<ref name="Hirschman"/>
One executive publicly predicted his move to reality TV would mean the end of his career as a newscaster.[citation needed]
[edit] 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.<ref name="Hirschman"/>" 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."<ref name="Hirschman"/>
In January 2005, he was sent to Sri Lanka 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 Camilla Parker Bowles.
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 August 2005, he covered the Niger famine from Maradi.
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."<ref>Jensen, Elizabeth (2005/09/12). An anchor who reports disaster news with a heart on his sleeve. The New York Times, Retrieved 09/27/2006, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/arts/television/12coop.html?ex=1284177600&en=7760c7061425d10a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss</ref> 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."<ref>Carter, Bill (2005/11/03). CNN ousts evening anchor and embraces rising star. The New York Times, Retrieved 09/27/2006, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/business/media/03fcnn.html?ex=1288674000&en=b527c6dd4e966bc9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss</ref> 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.<ref>Carter, Bill (2005/11/02). CNN ousts aaron brown and gives slot to anderson cooper. The New York Times, Retrieved 09/27/2006, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/business/media/02cnd-cnn.html?ex=1288587600&en=d8eb4f8cf2480e11&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss</ref>
[edit] Other work
- Cooper also is a free-lance writer whose articles have appeared in many other outlets, including Details magazine.[citation needed]
- In October 2005 it was announced that he signed a US $1 million contract to write a memoir for HarperCollins detailing his "life as a journalist and human being in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq and Louisiana/Mississippi" over the previous year. It is entitled Dispatches from the Edge and was released May 23, 2006. Some of Cooper's proceeds are being donated to charity. In addition, the book topped the New York Times bestseller list on June 18, 2006.[8]
- In early May 2006, it was reported that Cooper would serve as a contributor to yet another outlet, CBS News, and will contribute five reports a year for the CBS show, 60 Minutes. This will take effect during the start of the 2006-07 season.<ref>(2006/05/08). Cooper to contribute to 60 minutes. Retrieved September 27, 2006, from CBS News Web site: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/08/60minutes/main1598643.shtml</ref>
[edit] Awards
- 2005 National Headliners Award for his tsunami coverage [1];
- Emmy Award for his contribution to ABC's coverage of Princess Diana's funeral;
- Silver Plaque from the Chicago International Film Festival for his report from Sarajevo on the Bosnian civil war;
- Bronze Telly for his coverage of famine in Somalia;
- Bronze Award from the National Educational Film and Video Festival for a report on political Islam;
- GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Journalism for his 20/20 Downtown report on high school athlete Corey Johnson.
- 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Story Long Form for his report on the famine in Niger [2];
- 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Feature Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for his report on Charity Hospital[3];
[edit] Trivia
- Cooper was [4] photographed as a baby by Diane Arbus for Harper's Bazaar.<ref>Patricia Bosworth, "Diane Arbus: A Biography", NY: W.W. Norton, 1984</ref>
- Cooper started getting gray hair around age 20, and was completely gray by age 35.[5]
- Cooper was among the top ten men on Vanity Fair's international best-dressed list, which was published in the magazine's April 2004 issue. He appeared again on the international best-dressed list in the magazine's September 2006 issue.
- He has been named as one of the Sexiest Men Alive in 2005 by People magazine.[6]
- He was Number 3 on Playgirl magazine's Sexiest Newscasters List in 2004.[7]
[edit] External links
[edit] Official sites
[edit] News and media
- May 11, 2004: "So What Do You Do, Anderson Cooper?" from Media Bistro
- August 16, 2005: "My brother's suicide" from CNN
- September 12, 2005: "An Anchor Who Reports Disaster News With a Heart on His Sleeve" from the New York Times
- September 19, 2005: "Unanchored" from New York Magazine
- September 29, 2005: "CNN programs Cooper boost" from Variety
- October 12, 2005: "Anderson Cooper Memoir Goes to HarperCollins in $1 Million Deal" from The Book Standard
- November 2, 2005: "CNN Ousts Aaron Brown and Gives Slot to Anderson Cooper" from the New York Times
- May 23, 2006: The Oprah Winfrey Show: Anderson Cooper delves into his private life, including the suicide of his brother
- May 31, 2006: "Anderson Cooper Almost Comes Out On Top" with sales information for his book, from The Book Standard
- September 6, 2006: "Anderson Cooper's CIA Secret" -- a story from RADAR on Cooper's history with the C.I.A.
[edit] Profiles
- Anderson Cooper on About.com
- Anderson Cooper at the Internet Movie Database
- Anderson Cooper on the Notable Names Database
- Cspan "Students and Leaders" [8]
- The Story Behind Dispatches from the Edge (Official publisher web page)
[edit] References
<references/>
8. Anonymous. "New York Times Book Review", New York Times, 2006-06-18, p. 22.
| 60 Minutes Correspondents |
|---|
| Christiane Amanpour • Ed Bradley • Anderson Cooper • Katie Couric • Steve Kroft • Lara Logan • Scott Pelley • Dan Rather • Harry Reasoner • Morley Safer • Diane Sawyer • Bob Simon • Lesley Stahl • Mike Wallace |
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Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | 1967 births | Participants in American reality television series | American bloggers | American game show hosts | American journalists | American male models | Broadcast news analysts | CNN people | ABC News | Living people | People from New York City | American reporters and correspondents | American television journalists | Vanderbilt family
