I think it's time for Larry King to retire as well
Cooper's celebrity is part of the story in new CNN role
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | November 7, 2005
Tonight on CNN: The cult of personality begins.
That's how many media critics have reacted to the rise of Anderson Cooper, the 38-year-old news host who assumes the network's highest-profile anchor slot tonight.
When CNN announced last week that ''Anderson Cooper 360" was moving from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m on weekdays -- and that network stalwart Aaron Brown, host of ''NewsNight" in that time slot, was leaving altogether -- critics howled about the triumph of glitter over gravitas. The boyish metrosexual who once hosted the reality show ''The Mole" had edged out the measured, old-school anchorman. TV news would never be the same.
In truth, Cooper is significantly more than a suited-up entertainer. Despite his rarefied upbringing (he's the son of socialite designer Gloria Vanderbilt), he worked in the trenches for years for teen-oriented Channel One News and for ABC, reporting from trouble spots and disaster scenes and anchoring ABC's ''World News Now" before he got his eponymous show.
But among a certain urban set, Cooper enjoys a special sort of buzz, centered as much on persona as resume. Snarkier-than-thou blogs such as the media site Gawker.com obsess, and sometimes fawn, over his salt-and-pepper hair, his social life, and the recent sale of his $1.8 million Manhattan loft.
When Cooper turned major national news into what seemed like a personal crusade during Hurricane Katrina, the often cynical online set hailed him as a hero. When his interview with Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, veered into an angry monologue about the slow federal response, Gawker gushed: ''Was it possible for us to love Anderson Cooper more than we already did? Yes, it turns out, it was possible."
CNN has never shied away from promoting Cooper as a celebrity. The network's website posts his columns for Details magazine, featuring ruminations on everything from the real estate market (''Selling your apartment in New York is like dating a manic-depressive") to vacations (''I don't do vacations very well. By the second day I'm bored.")
And if he's part of the zeitgeist, all the better for CNN, says Jonathan Klein, the network's president. ''You like it when someone becomes a pop-culture icon and deserves it," Klein says.
Cooper was on vacation last week and unavailable for comment, a CNN spokeswoman said.
Last week's moves were the latest in a string of changes Klein has made since he took the helm of the network in November 2004. He dropped Bill Hemmer from the weekday show ''American Morning" and replaced him with Miles O'Brien. He killed the afternoon staples ''Inside Politics" and ''Crossfire" and established a flashier afternoon show, ''Situation Room," that features Wolf Blitzer standing in front of a bank of plasma TVs. He has put an emphasis on covering personalities, including those of his own staff; he once had Judy Woodruff interview Robert Novak about his conversion to Catholicism.
''It's very important to help the audience make an emotional connection to a story, and some people just know how to do it instinctively," Klein said. ''Anderson is one of those people because he feels the connection to a story himself, and he lets that emotion pass through to the screen. He's not afraid to show how much he cares."
Over the past year, Cooper has been front and center on the scene of a string of big-news tragedies: the Terri Schiavo affair in Florida, the death of the pope in Vatican City, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, Katrina in New Orleans.
High ratings haven't quite followed. All year, ''Anderson Cooper 360" has consistently drawn only about half the viewers of Fox News Channel's ''The Fox Report With Shepard Smith" in the same 7 p.m. time slot. And while ''NewsNight" ratings spiked when Cooper joined Brown on the show during the hurricane, by late October, with Cooper still on the program, viewership had dropped back to about previous levels, according to Nielsen data.
Still, Klein said, CNN's market research shows that viewers have responded to Cooper. ''The awareness of him and the proportion of people, of viewers, who say that they like him," Klein says, ''has gone through the roof."
It's unsurprising that Cooper's personality has become part of the story, says Matthew Felling, media director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, based in Washington D.C. Major news events have a way of promoting personalities, Felling notes. But the TV news business -- as Aaron Brown might attest -- has a way of moving on.
''Just as 9/11 begat [MSNBC anchor] Ashleigh Banfield, so did Katrina create Anderson Cooper," Felling said. ''Which begs the question: Anyone seen Ashleigh lately?"
Bono was on the next page. 
