The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley has THE take on the Anderson Cooper/Angelina Jolie CNN interview... check out these highlights:
....Mr. Cooper, the silver-haired CNN anchor, did not conduct an interview with the elusive actress; he held a conversation in which he seemed a little too eager to put himself on par with his guest as if the two of them belonged to an elite club of the concerned and caring. "You're not just talking the talk; you are walking the walk," he told Ms. Jolie, and then proceeded to talk a lot about his own walk through war zones and disaster areas, as if somehow that was an eccentric choice for a journalist.
He even managed to wedge in a mention of Hurricane Katrina: "One of the stories that we're doing, in this program, is about Niger," he said. "And I was there last summer right before Hurricane Katrina. And one in four children in Niger dies before the age of 5, which to me, I still cannot wrap my mind around."
...As much as Ms. Jolie used the occasion of motherhood to showcase her humanitarian work on CNN, the network used her humanitarian work to showcase its own talent. And that was a bit much. Mr. Cooper, who just published his autobiography, "Dispatches From the Edge," and was on the cover of Vanity Fair, has surely received plenty of publicity and praise.
For understandable reasons CNN relentlessly promoted the exclusive, and the network even persuaded Paula Zahn and Larry King to take time from their shows to interview their colleague about his scoop. Both seemed a little put out by the task. "You're talking more about the interview than the interview," Mr. King said to Mr. Cooper. "Are you getting a little tired of it?"
...[Cooper] praised Ms. Jolie for doing the interview solely to draw attention to the plight of refugees and not to promote a movie. He then seamlessly moved on to vigorously promote his best-selling book.
With journalists like that, its a small wonder celebrities are starting to do their own reporting.
