Rebecca Dana writes a fascinating piece--it actually reads a little bit like a CNN-career post-mortem, truth be told--on CNN's Anderson Cooper in the 7/3 issue of the New York Observer. It's a deeply fulfilling read: packed with juicy, thoughtful, vivid observations on Coop, CNN and 360 from anonymous cable and broadcast news execs. Why is Cooper failing so spectacularly? A multitude of opinions join the fray, and the piece isn't so much Monday-morning quarterbacking as it is like watching a spectacular loss in the Superbowl while listening to incredibly talented commentators:
Even Mr. Cooper’s great June triumph, the Jolie postpartum interview, trailed The O’Reilly Factor in total viewers, though it won the night among young viewers. At 1.33 million viewers, the Jolie interview was markedly smaller than a big night on Larry King—when Mr. King landed Elizabeth Taylor earlier this year, 1.8 million tuned in.
Why don’t more people tune in? One theory is that the evening cable news audience is more interested in Fox fare than the emo-cocktail offered up on 360. Another is that 360 itself is an inconsistent show, varying widely in topic and tone.
Another—a surprisingly popular one—is that Mr. Cooper himself, for all his vaunted good looks, is aesthetically ill-suited to television. The silver hair and piercing blue eyes make him all light and no contrast, a human green screen. “He’s wispy,” said the head of one cable news network. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
...There’s buzz he might climb the ranks at CBS, and more buzz on top of that, so much that it seems to have drowned out the little voice of Nielsen.
“I just don’t get it,” said one cable news executive. “I watch the show, and there’s nothing there for me. All of a sudden, I’m looking at the upfront for CBS, and he’s one of the faces of 60 Minutes. One of the three faces of 60 Minutes! How did that happen? It keeps rolling along, this media-sensation thing.”
Rolling and rolling and rolling. The Jolie interview alone helped to bring more than 500 Nexis mentions in two weeks. “He benefits from this P.R. machine that supports him and just propels him out there,” said one broadcast-network executive...
If Cooper jumped totally to CBS, it wouldn't surprise me; I've been saying for a while now that Cooper, an intelligent man, can't be incognizant of the fact that he's tanking at CNN, and may be hinting at leaving. And historically, he's been a traveling man, talking wistfully about life on the road with his camcorder. If you're Anderson Cooper, why not fly away from the pirate ship that's treated you like an especially beautiful trained parrot, complete with the gilded cage of a set?
