andersoncooper.com

It has been nine days since Anderson Cooper became Oprah Winfrey. For those of you who have not yet heard of this rebirth, you can witness the Anderson show firsthand on weekday afternoons, or if you’re without cable, you can also watch it on the Internet. I think that’s still legal.

Over the past week, I’ve contemplated Anderson’s sudden leap into the abyss of daytime television. (Because I’ve read his book twice, we are understandably on a first-name basis). I was just a toddler at the time of his first correspondence work in Myanmar, but I assure you it was epic. Cooper forged press passes and used a hand-held camera to sell homemade videos to Channel One, kicking off his career as a foreign correspondent in Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia, and as a news anchor and correspondent for CNN and CBS. I have since been a dedicated follower of his, so I feel more than equipped to provide some insight on the matter. To be frank, it disturbs me in ways which I can only equate to finding out that Christian Bale is Welsh (who knew?).

Anderson had always been a man of news, not talk. Talk show TV has many problems. Here’s the biggest one: it’s not news. So you can see why I was alarmed when, in turning on my television (OK, my MacBook), and expecting to see a riveting interview with some controversial figure, I instead found Cooper chatting up the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

It appears that after all those years on 360, the man has now spun himself onto a cream-coloured couch with a significantly more hormonal audience. But from what I can surmise, there is only one reason for what has happened: perhaps Cooper is a diehard fan of the scoop. And really, really likes to gossip.  

But I don’t mean to use the term “gossip” to suggest full-blown Perez Hilton dirt-dishing. Let’s not forget that Anderson did go to Yale. That’s second behind Harvard, America’s McGill. What I mean to say is that Anderson sure enjoys sharing his feelings, not just feelings about himself, but feelings about other people’s feelings, too. The show delves into much of Cooper’s previously unheard-of childhood, his favourite pastimes, and that time he got a spray tan with Snookie. More importantly, he welcomes to his couch people like Kyle Richards and Mr. and Mrs. Winehouse. Soon he will be getting Botox and highlights like the rest of them (he probably already does, there’s no way that silver head is real).  

Anderson may have left war zones and disaster areas for Hollywood’s boulevards, but all things aside, news or talk, he can still tell a good story.