TimeWarner's customers &content : Journalistic Integrity with Andersn

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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the News: Interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper
Q. I’ve read that, after Yale, you wanted to be a reporter so badly that you traveled on your own to do stories. True?
A. I wanted to get into news, and I couldn’t get an entry-level job at ABC. So I got a home video camera and decided to go cover a war. I traveled around Southeast Asia and lived in Vietnam for a while, and then traveled in Somalia.
Q. What was it about journalism that appealed to you?
A. I remember the first time I told a story. I snuck into Burma, and hooked up with some students opposing the Burmese government. And I realized that this was everything I wanted in a job—travel, creativity, doing something I thought was important. I liked having the ability to tell someone’s story, and the relationship you could develop, and the trust they put in you to tell their story. I found it moving and appealing, and I wanted to learn more about it, and explore that relationship.
Q. How much influence do you have over the stories that are covered on Anderson Cooper 360º?
A. The decisions about what goes on the show are ones that I make along with the executive producers and senior producers. The best way to get a show that reflects differing viewpoints is to get people together with different backgrounds and ideas.
Q. What stories do you like to cover?
A. I like to cover a mix of stories. I don’t believe in wearing my opinion on my sleeve. I know it’s popular in cable news. It’s just not something I subscribe to.
My interest has always been international reporting. My instinct is often to look for stories that other people aren’t telling, or stories that may be out of the headlines but remain important. We spent a week in Niger this past summer. I happened to be in Africa on vacation, and was reading about the famine in Niger, and called up the show and said, “Let’s go.” That’s what’s great about this job. If there are stories we feel passionate about, we can go and do them.
Q. That raises the question of how you balance what people seem to watch—I’m thinking of all the coverage of crime stories like the Laci Peterson murder—with the need to tell important stories that viewers may not be as eager to hear.
A. There is always going to be tension. If ratings are all you care about, you build a certain kind of show, and it’s pretty obvious what kind of show that would be. Ratings are obviously important. I’d like to keep my job. But there are things that are more important. I think CNN keeps that in perspective. I don’t have people calling me up and saying, “Get the ratings.” When management people call me, it’s to say, “This is an interesting story. Let’s look at it.”
Q. The story you are identified with most closely is Hurricane Katrina, right?
A. I take great pride in the Peabody Award that CNN won for Katrina coverage. That’s a story we believed in, and we continue to believe in. I cover it virtually every night. I try to repeatedly go back. Part of the United States was ripped apart, and part of the heart of the United States was cut out.
To me, it’s not a question of “why do we continue to do that story?” To me, the question is “why aren’t more people continuing to focus on what’s going on there?” For the people in the Gulf states, the winds of Katrina are still blowing.
Q. So you see your role, in part, as the traditional journalistic role of putting a spotlight on problems in the hope that something will then get done.
A. Yes, we have to be more than just a catalog of who’s missing, or a catalog of crime stories. For some people in cable news, that’s all they do, that’s all they traffic in. Well, that’s not what is happening in the United States. Those stories may be interesting or titillating and they are certainly tragic for the people involved, but they are not the war in Iraq. They are not stories that will be truly important in the long term, for all of us, and for our children and grandchildren.
I do believe we have a responsibility, and it’s easy to lose sight of that in this highly competitive, highly charged cable news environment. I don’t think CNN has lost sight of that, and I don’t think we will.

Go Behind-the-Scenes with CNN’s Anderson Cooper
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