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Anderson Cooper has built a career on restraint.
With hair that started turning silver at just age 20, perfectly tailored suits and a measured cadence, it all cultivated the authority of a man slightly apart from the noise.
Yet the moments that fixed the American broadcaster in the public imagination were the ones when his composure cracked: flashes of anger in the floodwaters of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the visible emotion he showed when confronting government officials live on air.
That instinct appears to have shaped his latest decision. Cooper left CBS’s 60 Minutes programme this week after nearly two decades, having joined in 2006. The move, according to people familiar with the matter, reflected both personal considerations — a desire to focus on his role at CNN and his young family — and discomfort with the programme’s editorial direction under the new leadership of “anti cancel-culture” journalist Bari Weiss.
“He has a very clear sense of what’s right, and he’s not afraid to stand up for it,” says Jeff Zucker, who ran CNN from 2013 to 2022.
Weiss, who built a following on a critique of liberal orthodoxies through her start-up The Free Press and had no prior experience running a TV news division, was installed by new corporate owner David Ellison as CBS News editor-in-chief in October. Her tenure has been turbulent, punctuated by her decision to delay a 60 Minutes segment on an El Salvador prison — something that drew criticism from the newsroom. Last week a departing producer said staff felt pressure to “self-censor”.
Cooper’s exit from CBS is the latest example of his tendency to pull back when the fit feels wrong. The 58-year-old has spent much of his life keeping a distance from the institutions that conferred prestige on him, including the one he was born into.
Cooper is part of the Vanderbilt family, one of America’s oldest dynasties, via his heiress mother Gloria. His first two decades were marked by tragedy as well as opulence. His father, a screenwriter, died when he was 10 years old. A decade later, Cooper’s older brother Carter died by suicide, jumping from a terrace in their Upper East Side home.
Grief propelled the young scion into risky arenas. After studying at Yale, he dispatched himself to war zones such as Myanmar and Somalia, armed with a faux press pass and a home video camera, which he used to film reports for classroom news provider Channel One. In a 2022 New Yorker interview he said his early travels took him to places that “were precarious, very real, elemental — where life and death were something that people wrestled with and spoke about”.
It was in the early 2000s, after a turn at ABC hosting a reality TV show, that Cooper’s career began to pick up pace. Hosting gigs at CNN led to his first primetime show, Anderson Cooper 360°, in 2003.
But it was when he reported from the sites of Hurricane Katrina’s wreckage in 2005 that Cooper became a recognisable personality for many Americans. Confronting a Louisiana senator in the disaster’s aftermath, he spoke of a body left in the streets for two days, “being eaten by rats”, and demanded: “Do you get the anger that is out here?”
The exchange marked the moment Cooper became something more than a polished anchor, in the mould of Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw. He emerged as a witness unwilling to sanitise what he saw. CNN expanded his role, with then president Jonathan Klein calling him “the anchorperson of the future”.
“Anderson desperately cares about the truth, he wears his emotions openly, and he’s got life experiences that few other anchors bring,” says Zucker. “That makes him stand out from almost anyone.”
Cooper’s departure from CBS raises questions about the future of the traditional news anchor in an increasingly polarised America, as traditional television viewership declines.
His exit is “the latest sign the middle ground is shrinking”, says Gabriel Kahn, a USC Annenberg journalism professor and former Wall Street Journal bureau chief. “There is no room for down the middle reporting.”
For Cooper, the desire to report on crisis has always been personal as well as professional. The suicide of his brother — something he has spoken about often — left him preoccupied with rupture and survival.
In recent years, the anchor has leaned into his vulnerability. After his mother died in 2019, he created a CNN podcast about grief, collecting stories from celebrity guests about their losses.
His reserve has eased in other ways. Long guarded about his private life, Cooper has spoken openly about becoming a father in his fifties and co-parenting his two young children with his former partner Benjamin Maisani. He hosts a New Year’s Eve broadcast with friend Andy Cohen during which he frequently dissolves into laughter, offering a glimpse into a person who is comfortable off-script.
Cooper’s departure from 60 Minutes comes as the age of the all-encompassing network anchor fades. It is, Kahn says, “another drip, drip, drip in the trusted voices” leaving.
Then again, he did not fit neatly into the old model. “Walter Cronkite wasn’t relatable, he was authoritative. Anderson Cooper is authoritative but also relatable,” adds Kahn.Cooper’s career is therefore not bound by CBS. He is a hybrid who “exists outside the brand that hosts him”.
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