I'm worried about Anderson Cooper. CNN's star anchor is on the cover of Vanity Fair this month looking ever so much like someone just garroted his dog. The bereft gaze, his magnificently blue eyes watery and red. Oh my God. He's been crying!
Anderson, buddy, you OK? Would you like an incompetent federal official to chew on?
Whoever approved this photo--Annie Leibovitz, Graydon Carter, Anderson's agent?--should be thrown under the satellite truck. Cooper's image as CNN's Deeply Compassionate Man, the emo-anchor, was already perilously close to self-parody, and now, well, sharks have been jumped. I can't help thinking of James L. Brooks' movie "Broadcast News," in which William Hurt's character sheds an empathetic tear and becomes a star. Cooper--propelled to the info-pop empery with his trembling, awed and ireful coverage of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans--is mining the same vein of trumped-up pathos. Anderson Cooper: He feels your pain.
Or, in my case, he is my pain. Cooper is the foremost practitioner of the Stanislavsky school of newscasting, in which the degree of human tragedy is registered in escalating degrees of emotionalism. Actually, Anderson is the best of the lot. The worst? Anybody? That's right: Geraldo.
This is Cooper's breakout season. By the time you read this, the host of CNN's prime-time "Anderson Cooper 360°"--although it often feels more like 24/7--will have had couch time with Oprah. Cooper, 39, has a new memoir, "Dispatches from the Edge," in which he reveals that the public tragedy of New Orleans summoned up private losses, the deaths of his father and older brother.
"I tried to move on, forget what I'd lost, but the truth is, none of it's ever gone away," Cooper writes. "The past is all around, and in New Orleans I can't pretend it's not." This seems an exceedingly convenient bit of catharsis, as well as a triumph of amour-propre. The death of a major city made Cooper feel sorry for himself.
To be sure, Cooper is a compelling figure, not least because of his compelling figure: the close-cropped iron-gray hair, the flawless skin, the runner's physique, and those glacier-melt blue eyes--believe me, "dreamy" and "journalist" aren't words that often keep company. He can be charmingly offhand and unpolished at times. He stammers, wanders off-topic, and sometimes cracks himself up. These are delicious moments for an audience that has fed on the synthetic wallboard of prime-time network news.
