And then there's this: Slate TV critic Troy Patterson takes on Cooper's handling of the Jolie interview AND compares him unfavorably to Britney-wrangler Matt Lauer:
...Early on, Cooper set up one of his fawning questions by referring to problems Jolie has had getting her message heard through "this blur of sort of endless suffering in Africa." Then he went on to duplicate it, introducing a slew of indistinguishable dispatches about inhumanity in the sub-Sahara. The various reporters did very little in terms of explaining the tribal pasts, the political presents, or the long-term futures involved with half a dozen catastrophes. Rather, they simply spoke over shot after shot of people on the edge of death. Just as I was wondering when they'd tell me what I could do for the price of a cup of coffee, CNN showed a 1-800 number. Maybe this was admirable, but the footage of so much inhumanity with so little context doesn't do much to humanize the victims.
In the almost-a-year-now since Cooper surfed Hurricane Katrina to superstardom, has anyone forwarded the idea that the key to his particular success as a newsman is that he is a Vanderbilt? Whereas the on-air styles of such anchors as Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather are bound up with their urges to bounce up and out of the middle-American middle class, an aristocrat like Coop is acting, in some way, out of noblesse oblige, and it showed both in his righteousness in New Orleans and in his courtliness with Jolie. He would never even begin to think of slithering around the what's-off-limits agreement his producers worked out with the do-gooder's handlers.
Thankfully, Matt Lauer, though a son of Manhattan's upper middle class, has no such inhibitions. It has now been 20 months since Barbara Walters retired from 20/20, and Lauer's June 15 Dateline NBC sit-down with Britney Spears—a conversation focusing on her career, her judgment in selecting spouses, and her "so-called mommy mistakes"—suggests that he is the new master of the celebrity interview, which is not an art but, like boxing, a science. In "Britney Spears Speaking Out," Lauer looked like Sugar Ray Leonard at the '76 Olympics....
Home »
» Slate: CNN couldn't cover popular culture with a tarp
