Couple of new things I learned:
I didn't know Cooper's father was born poor in Mississippi. Like most people, I guess I just always saw the Gloria Vanderbilt side.
It's hard to explain, but I guess I came away from the long piece with even more respect for him as a person and a journalist. I get the feeling like this is a journey, just like the overseas reporting was, and whether they want him in this anchor chair or that anchor chair, he's going to follow his gut, and that may take him to new anchor chairs or back to the CNN New York studios, or maybe just somewhere else altogether. How can you not admire someone willing to do that?
One particular paragraph in the story just jumped out at me too, and I wanted to quote it:
Link: Anderson Cooper's Hurricane Katrina Coverage - A Breakthrough for TV News.
Unanchored
By Jonathan Van Meter[...]
Once the bodies are counted, the Katrina aftermath will probably turn out to be the worst natural disaster in American history. It’s also the first one we’ve had to endure without the three sonorous authority figures—Tom, Dan, and Peter—who explained unfathomable events on the nightly news for a quarter century. With the field wide open, the two anchors who have defined the coverage of the Gulf Coast nightmare are Anderson Cooper and NBC’s Brian Williams, who was the first of the network anchors to broadcast from the storm and who became the main news filter for most Americans. In many ways, Cooper and Williams defined a fork in the road for the future of broadcast journalism. Williams responded to the anguish of Americans with the reassuring, authoritative presence of past anchors (though even he had to fight back his emotions to steady himself). When it feels as if the world is unraveling, the appeal of such a father figure is obvious. Cooper did the opposite. He didn’t calm us down; he made us feel even more unsettled. He became a proxy, both for the victims of Katrina and for his viewers, building a bridge between the two. He reacted the way any of us might have—raging against government officials when help didn’t come fast enough, and weeping when it all got to be too much. But it wasn’t just his raw emotion that set him apart; there are plenty of hotheads on television, and tearing up became more and more common as the tragedy continued to unfold. It was his honest humanity; he comes off as genuine because he is. He connected to those in the hurricane’s path, and to the people watching at home. He removed the filter.
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