Anderson Hays Cooper born June 3, 1967 is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator currently anchoring the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360°. In addition to his duties at CNN, Cooper serves as a correspondent for 60 Minutes on CBS News. After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News. Cooper was hired by Anderson Cooper ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in morning talk show host.
Anderson Cooper Facts
- Born: Anderson Hays CooperJune 3, 1967 (age 56)New York City, U.S.
- Alma mater : Yale University (BA)
- Occupations: Broadcast journalist, political commentator
- Years active : 1990–present
- Employers: Channel One News (1990–1995)
- Television: Anderson Cooper 360°, Anderson Live, Anderson Cooper Full Circle
- Children: 2
Anderson Cooper Early life and education
Cooper was born in Manhattan, New York City, the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist Gloria Vanderbilt. His maternal grandparents were millionaire equestrian Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family and socialite Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and Reginald’s patrilineal great-grandfather was business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the prominent Vanderbilt shipping and railroad fortune. He has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus “Stan” Stokowski (b. 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (b. 1952), from Gloria’s ten-year marriage to conductor Leopold Stokowski.In 2014, Cooper appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots, where he learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States.
Cooper’s media experience began early. As a baby, he was photographed by Diane Arbus for Harper’s Bazaar. At the age of three, Cooper was a guest on The Tonight Show on September 17, 1970, appearing with his mother.[citation needed] At the age of nine, he appeared on To Tell the Truth as an impostor. Fom age 10 to 13, Cooper modeled with Ford Models for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Macy’s.
Wyatt experienced a series of heart attacks while undergoing open-heart surgery, and died January 5, 1978, at the age of 50. Cooper considers his father’s book Families to be “sort of a guide on… how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him.”
When Cooper was 21, his older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of Vanderbilt’s New York City penthouse apartment. Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son’s death in the book A Mother’s Story, in which she expressed her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug salbutamol. Carter’s suicide sparked Anderson’s interest in journalism:
Cooper attended the Dalton School, a private co-educational day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. At age 17, after graduating from Dalton a semester early, Cooper traveled around Africa for several months on a “survival trip”. He contracted malaria on the trip and was hospitalized in Kenya. Describing the experience, Cooper wrote “Africa was a place to forget and be forgotten in.”Cooper attended Yale University, where he resided in Trumbull College and was a coxswain on the lightweight rowing team. He was inducted into the Manuscript Society and majored in political science, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989.
Anderson Cooper Career
During college, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency while studying political science.He pursued journalism with no formal journalistic education. He is a self-proclaimed “news junkie since [he] was in utero”. After his first correspondence work in the early 1990s, he took a break from reporting and lived in Vietnam for a year, during which time he studied the Vietnamese language at Vietnam National University, Hanoi.
Anderson Cooper Channel One
After Cooper graduated from Yale, he tried to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones, but was unsuccessful. Finding it hard to get his foot in the door of on-air reporting, Cooper decided to enlist the help of a friend in making a fake press pass. At the time, Cooper was working as a fact checker for the small news agency Channel One,Anderson Cooper which produces a youth-oriented news program that is broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States. Cooper then entered Myanmar on his own with his forged press pass and met with students fighting the Burmese government.
After reporting from Myanmar, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year to study the Vietnamese language at the University of Hanoi. Persuading Channel One to allow him to bring a Hi8 camera with him, Cooper began filming and assembling reports of Vietnamese life and culture that aired on Channel One. In 1992, he filmed stories from Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.[citation needed]
After having been on such assignments for a couple of years, Cooper realized in 1994 that he had slowly become desensitized to the violence he was witnessing around him; the horrors of the Rwandan genocide became trivial: “I would see a dozen bodies and think, you know, it’s a dozen, it’s not so bad.”[10] One particular incident, however, snapped him out of it:[10]On the side of the road [Cooper] came across five bodies that had been in the sun for several days. The skin of a woman’s hand was peeling off like a glove. Revealing macabre fascination, Cooper whipped out his disposable camera and took a closeup photograph for his personal album. As he did, someone took a photo of him. Later that person showed Cooper the photo, saying, “You need to take a look at what you were doing.” “And that’s when I realized I’ve got to stop, […] I’ve got to report on some state fairs or a beauty pageant or something, to just, like, remind myself of some perspective.”
Anderson Cooper ABC
In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor on its overnight World News Now program on September 21, 1999. In 2000, he switched career paths, taking a job as the host of ABC’s reality show The Mole:My last year at ABC, I was working overnights anchoring this newscast, then during the day at 20/20. So I was sleeping in two- or four-hour shifts, and I was really tired and wanted a change. I wanted to clear my head and get out of news a little bit, and I was interested in reality TV—and it was interesting.
Cooper was also a fill-in co-host for Regis Philbin on Live with Regis and Kelly in 2007 when Philbin underwent triple-bypass heart surgery.019, he still periodically serves as guest co-host on Live when one of the two hosts cannot go in to work.[citation needed
Anderson Cooper CNN
Anderson Cooper covering the Trump/Kim Summit in Singapore, 2018Cooper left The Mole after its second season to return to broadcast news. In 2001, he joined CNN, commenting, “Two seasons was enough, and 9/11 happened, and I thought I needed to be getting back to news.” His first position at CNN was to anchor alongside Paula Zahn on American Morning. In 2002, he became CNN’s weekend prime-time anchor. Since 2002, he has hosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve special from Times Square.[citation needed]
On September 8, 2003, Cooper became the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN.Anderson Cooper Describing his philosophy as an anchor, he has said:
Anderson Cooper In 2005, Cooper covered the tsunami damage in Sri Lanka; the Cedar Revolution in Beirut, Lebanon; the death of Pope John Paul II; and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. In August 2005, he covered the Niger famine from Maradi.[citation needed]
Cooper covering a 2007 protest of the government response to Hurricane Katrina
In 2005, during CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Anderson Cooper he confronted Sen. Mary Landrieu, Sen. Trent Lott, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson about their perception of the government response. As Cooper said later in an interview with New York magazine, “Yeah, I would prefer not to be emotional and I would prefer not to get upset, but it’s hard not to when you’re surrounded by brave people who are suffering and in need.”A contributor to Broadcasting & Cable magazine wrote: “In its aftermath, Hurricane Katrina served to usher in a new breed of emo-journalism, skyrocketing CNN’s Anderson Cooper to superstardom as CNN’s golden boy and a darling of the media circles because of his impassioned coverage of the storm.”
Anderson Cooper In September 2005, the format of CNN’s NewsNight was changed from 60 to 120 minutes to cover the unusually violent hurricane season. Anderson Cooper To help distribute some of the increased workload, Cooper was temporarily added as co-anchor to Aaron Brown. This arrangement was reported to have been made permanent the same month by the president of CNN’s U.S. operations, Jonathan Klein, who has called Cooper “the anchorperson of the future”. Following the addition of Cooper, the ratings for NewsNight increased significantly; Anderson Cooper Klein remarked that “[Cooper’s] name has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue.” To further capitalize on this, Klein announced a major programming shakeup on November 2, 2005. Cooper’s 360° program would be expanded to two hours and shifted into the 10:00pm ET slot formerly held by NewsNight, with the third hour of Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room filling in Cooper’s former 7:00pm ET slot. With “no options” left for him to host shows, Aaron Brown left CNN, ostensibly having “mutually agreed” with Jonathan Klein on the matter.
Anderson Cooper Personal life
As of 2016, Cooper was not registered to any political party.
Anderson Cooper While promoting his book, Cooper told Oprah Winfrey he had dyslexia as a child.
Cooper is openly gay; as of 2012, he was (according to The New York Times) “the most prominent openly gay journalist on American television”.For years, Cooper avoided discussing Anderson Cooper his private life in interviews. On July 2, 2012, however, he gave Andrew Sullivan permission to publish an email that stated, in part:
In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook, before making the decision to publicly come out as gay, sought Cooper’s advice.
In 2014, Cooper and his long-term partner at the time, Benjamin Maisani, purchased Rye House, a historic estate in Connecticut. In March 2018, Cooper confirmed that he and Maisani had split up.
Cooper was friends with Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and host of the Anderson Cooper CNN series Parts Unknown. After Bourdain died by suicide on June 8, 2018, Cooper paid tribute to him in a CNN special program, Remembering Anthony Bourdain. Cooper also paid tribute to Bourdain on the Thanksgiving 2020 episode of Anderson Cooper Full Circle, saying that he “was proud to call Anthony Bourdain a friend”, and adding: “He is so, so missed by so many.”
Anderson Cooper In 2021, Cooper and co-author Katherine Howe published Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, a history of the Vanderbilt family going back to his Vanderbilt ancestors who came to New Amsterdam in the 17th century.