Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator who anchors the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360°. In addition to his duties at CNN, for two decades Cooper served as a correspondent for 60 Minutes, produced by CBS News. After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News. Cooper was hired by ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in morning talk show host.
In 2001, Cooper joined CNN, where he was given his own show, Anderson Cooper 360°; he has remained the show's host since. He developed a reputation for his on-the-ground reporting of breaking news events, with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina causing his popularity to sharply increase. For his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Cooper received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honor granted by the Haitian government. From September 2011 to May 2013, he also served as the host of his own syndicated television daytime talk show, Anderson Live.
Cooper has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, as well as an Edward Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2011. A member of the Vanderbilt family, he came out as gay in 2012, becoming "the most prominent gay journalist on American television". In 2016, Cooper became the first LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate, and he has received several GLAAD Media Awards.
Early life and education Cooper was born in Manhattan, New York City, the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist Gloria Vanderbilt. His maternal grandparents were millionaire equestrian Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family and socialite Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and Reginald's patrilineal great-grandfather was business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the prominent Vanderbilt shipping and railroad fortune. He has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus "Stan" Stokowski (b. 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (b. 1952), from Gloria's ten-year marriage to conductor Leopold Stokowski. In 2014, Cooper appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots, where he learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States.
Cooper grew up in the Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan, New York and in Southampton, New York on Long Island.
Cooper's media experience began early. As a baby, he was photographed by Diane Arbus for Harper's Bazaar.Patricia Bosworth, "Diane Arbus: A Biography", NY: W.W. Norton, 1984 At the age of three, Cooper was a guest on The Tonight Show on September 17, 1970, appearing with his mother. At the age of nine, he appeared on To Tell the Truth as an impostor. From age 10 to 13, Cooper modeled with Ford Models for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Macy's.Van Meter, Jonathan, "Unanchored", New York , September 19, 2005 (Retrieved on September 27, 2006).
Wyatt experienced a series of heart attacks while undergoing open-heart surgery, and died January 5, 1978, at the age of 50. Cooper considers his father's book Families to be "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."
When Cooper was 21, his older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, died by 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 expressed her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug salbutamol. Carter's suicide sparked Anderson's interest in journalism:
Cooper attended the Dalton School, a private co-educational day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. At age 17, after graduating from Dalton a semester early, Cooper traveled around Africa for several months on a "survival trip". He contracted malaria on the trip and was hospitalized in Kenya. Describing the experience, Cooper wrote "Africa was a place to forget and be forgotten in." Cooper attended Yale University, where he resided in Trumbull College and was a coxswain on the lightweight rowing team. He was inducted into the Manuscript Society and majored in political science, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989.
Career Early career During college, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency while studying political science. He pursued journalism with no formal journalistic education. He is a self-proclaimed "news junkie since [he] was in utero".
Channel One After Cooper graduated from Yale, he tried to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones, but was unsuccessful. Finding it hard to get his foot in the door of on-air reporting, Cooper decided to enlist the help of a friend in making a fake press pass. At the time, Cooper was working as a fact checker for the small news agency Channel One, which produced a youth-oriented news program that was broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States. Cooper then entered Myanmar on his own with his forged press pass and met with students fighting the Burmese government.
After reporting from Myanmar, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year to study the Vietnamese language at the University of Hanoi. Persuading Channel One to allow him to bring a Hi8 camera with him, Cooper began filming and assembling reports of Vietnamese life and culture that aired on Channel One. In 1992, he filmed stories from Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.
After having been on such assignments for a couple of years, Cooper realized in 1994 that he had slowly become desensitized to the violence he was witnessing around him; the horrors of the Rwandan genocide became trivial: "I would see a dozen bodies and think, you know, it's a dozen, it's not so bad." One particular incident, however, snapped him out of it:
ABC In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor on its overnight World News Now program on September 21, 1999. In 2000, he switched career paths, taking a job as the host of ABC's reality show The Mole:
Cooper was also a fill-in co-host for Regis Philbin on Live with Regis and Kelly in 2007 when Philbin underwent triple-bypass heart surgery. As of 2019, he still periodically serves as guest co-host on Live when one of the two hosts cannot go in to work.
CNN
Cooper left The Mole after its second season to return to broadcast news. In 2001, he joined CNN, commenting, "Two seasons was enough, and 9/11 happened, and I thought I needed to be getting back to news." 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.
Anderson Cooper 360° On September 8, 2003, Cooper became the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN. Describing his philosophy as an anchor, he has said:
In 2005, Cooper covered the tsunami damage in Sri Lanka; the Cedar Revolution in Beirut, Lebanon; the death of Pope John Paul II; and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. In August 2005, he covered the Niger famine from Maradi.
In 2005, during CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he confronted Sen. Mary Landrieu, Sen. Trent Lott, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson about their perception of the government response. As Cooper said later in an interview with New York magazine, "Yeah, I would prefer not to be emotional and I would prefer not to get upset, but it's hard not to when you're surrounded by brave people who are suffering and in need." A contributor to Broadcasting & Cable magazine wrote: "In its aftermath, Hurricane Katrina served to usher in a new breed of emo-journalism, skyrocketing CNN's Anderson Cooper to superstardom as CNN's golden boy and a darling of the media circles because of his impassioned coverage of the storm."
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".Jensen, Elizabeth (September 12, 2005), "An anchor who reports disaster news with a heart on his sleeve", The New York Times. . Retrieved September 27, 2006. 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."Carter, Bill, "CNN ousts evening anchor and embraces rising star", The New York Times , November 3, 2005 (Retrieved September 27, 2006). To further capitalize on this, Klein announced a major programming shakeup on November 2, 2005. Cooper's 360° program would be expanded to two hours and shifted into the 10:00 pm ET slot formerly held by NewsNight, with the third hour of Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room filling in Cooper's former 7:00 pm ET slot. With "no options" left for him to host shows, Aaron Brown left CNN, ostensibly having "mutually agreed" with Jonathan Klein on the matter.Carter, Bill, "CNN ousts Aaron Brown and gives slot to Anderson Cooper", The New York Times , November 2, 2005 (Retrieved September 27, 2006).
In early 2007, Cooper signed a multi-year deal with CNN that would allow him to continue as a contributor to 60 Minutes, as well as doubling his salary from $2 million annually to a reported $4 million.
The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper On April 16, 2023, CNN launched a new Sunday primetime series, The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.
CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute In 2007, he began hosting CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, a show about extraordinary deeds by ordinary people.
Planet in Peril documentary In October 2007, Cooper began hosting the documentary Planet in Peril with Sanjay Gupta and Jeff Corwin on CNN. In 2008, Cooper, Gupta, and Lisa Ling from National Geographic Explorer teamed up for a sequel, Planet in Peril: Battle Lines, which premiered in December 2008.
Syndicated talk show: Anderson Live In September 2010, Warner Bros. and Telepictures (both corporate siblings of CNN) announced that Cooper had signed an agreement to host a nationally syndicated talk show. The journalist Brian Stelter (at the time employed by The New York Times, and now by CNN), reported on Twitter that the new Warner Bros. daytime talk show would be named Anderson (now titled Anderson Live). The show premiered on September 12, 2011, and as part of negotiations over the talk show deal, Cooper signed a new multi-year contract with CNN to continue as the host of Anderson Cooper 360°. On October 29, 2012, it was announced that Anderson Live would end at the conclusion of its second season. The show, slightly renamed after season one and revamped with a variety of co-hosts, failed to achieve the ratings distributor Warner Brothers hoped for. The final Anderson Live aired on May 30, 2013.
2016 presidential debates Along with Martha Raddatz, Cooper moderated the second presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This made him the first LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate in the general election.
New Year's Eve