Broadcast journalist Cooper sticks to facts in UA speech
Posted on Saturday, March 8, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper has witnessed humanity at its best and worst while covering news in 50 countries during his career.
But it’s not his place to let his personal outrage turn him into an advocate, he said.
Speaking before an audience of about 3, 000 Friday night at the University of Arkansas, the selfdeprecating reporter deflected questions aimed at eliciting his opinion about current events.
“I believe in facts and information and not in opinion,” said Cooper, anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.
“I do not care about what an overpaid and over-blowdried anchor — and I include myself in that category — thinks about the issues, and I don’t think others should either.” Cooper, 40, spoke in Barnhill Arena as part of the Fayetteville campus’s student-financed Distinguished Lecture Series.
Since joining CNN in December 2001, he has anchored coverage of the war in Iraq. As a correspondent, he was dispatched to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and to Qatar. He covered the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf Coast, where he said he witnessed suffering not much different than things he’d seen overseas.
It’s hard not to have opinions at all.
“When you see bodies in the streets in the United States and see nothing is being done — then seeing politicians praise themselves was surely infuriating.” Cooper is a former correspondent with ABC News, where he co-anchored its laidback, late-night news program geared toward insomniacs and night owls, World News Now. He couldn’t get his foot in the door initially at ABC, “which shows you the value of a Yale education.” “So, I decided I would go to wars,” Cooper said. He set out for places like the jungles of Burma toting a fake press pass crafted by a friend on a Macintosh computer.
The anchor, son of designer / heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, once sought her advice while seeking a waiter job, but she was hardly practical, he said.
“All she said was wear vertical stripes,” Cooper said to laughter. Her career advice was more on-point: “She told me to ‘ follow your bliss. ’” Cooper wrote the 2006 memoir Dispatches from the Edge and won an Emmy for his part in ABC’s coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral.
A young girl in the audience asked him how he avoided getting depressed.
“You carry these people you meet with you, and at some point, your heart is too full of these people,” Cooper said. Sometimes, he believes he can no longer bear to hear their stories, but then reminds himself “you have to allow yourself to be depressed.” “There’s an obligation to keep doing it,” he said.
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