In Sunday's LA Times Magazine, Dan Neil writes that he's sick of feeling Anderson Cooper's pain--and judging by Cooper's ratings--down 23% from Aaron Brown's last year--so is everybody else:
Cooper's image as CNN's Deeply Compassionate Man, the emo-anchor, was already perilously close to self-parody, and now, well, sharks have been jumped...
....I have no doubt that Cooper was deeply affected by the events of New Orleans. But news anchors get only one such episode to register their humanity. Walter Cronkite choked up the day JFK died. Dan Rather lost it on 9/11. Any more than that and they start to look unstable, emotionally opportunistic and, worst of all, unreliable.
A case in point is the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia. I'll never forget the look on Cooper's face when, after hours on-air, he was told the trapped miners had not, as it was earlier reported, survived. Cooper had allowed himself to be caught up in the relief, the elation of relatives and friends—indeed, he had played to it because it made good TV—and that undercut him just as he needed journalistic objectivity most.
Curiously, even as Cooper has become a bona-fide MSM pop star—with talk of his taking over one of the big network anchor chairs—his rating have gone soft. With all his tragic intensity and killer looks, Cooper's ratings in April were down 23% from those of stolid old Aaron Brown, who had the same time slot in April 2005. It would be too much to correlate this drop with Cooper's maddening vulnerability. But I wouldn't dismiss the idea, either.
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» LA Times: CNN's Cooper, newscaster as professional mourner
