‘I’ on America

I’m worried about Anderson Cooper. CNN’s star anchor is on the cover of Vanity Fair this month looking ever so much like someone just garroted his dog. The bereft gaze, his magnificently blue eyes watery and red. Oh my God. He’s been crying!

Anderson, buddy, you OK? Would you like an incompetent federal official to chew on?

Whoever approved this photo--Annie Leibovitz, Graydon Carter, Anderson’s agent?--should be thrown under the satellite truck. 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 can’t help thinking of James L. Brooks’ movie “Broadcast News,” in which William Hurt’s character sheds an empathetic tear and becomes a star. Cooper--propelled to the info-pop empery with his trembling, awed and ireful coverage of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans--is mining the same vein of trumped-up pathos. Anderson Cooper: He feels your pain.

Or, in my case, he is my pain. Cooper is the foremost practitioner of the Stanislavsky school of newscasting, in which the degree of human tragedy is registered in escalating degrees of emotionalism. Actually, Anderson is the best of the lot. The worst? Anybody? That’s right: Geraldo.

This is Cooper’s breakout season. By the time you read this, the host of CNN’s prime-time “Anderson Cooper 360°”--although it often feels more like 24/7--will have had couch time with Oprah. Cooper, 39, has a new memoir, “Dispatches from the Edge,” in which he reveals that the public tragedy of New Orleans summoned up private losses, the deaths of his father and older brother.

“I tried to move on, forget what I’d lost, but the truth is, none of it’s ever gone away,” Cooper writes. “The past is all around, and in New Orleans I can’t pretend it’s not.” This seems an exceedingly convenient bit of catharsis, as well as a triumph of amour-propre. The death of a major city made Cooper feel sorry for himself.

To be sure, Cooper is a compelling figure, not least because of his compelling figure: the close-cropped iron-gray hair, the flawless skin, the runner’s physique, and those glacier-melt blue eyes--believe me, “dreamy” and “journalist” aren’t words that often keep company. He can be charmingly offhand and unpolished at times. He stammers, wanders off-topic, and sometimes cracks himself up. These are delicious moments for an audience that has fed on the synthetic wallboard of prime-time network news.

And so Cooper, a beautiful man with a beautiful mind, has become a pop star, and in one indignant moment a hero to millions who had waited for someone to speak truth to power. It happened on the fourth day after Hurricane Katrina, in an interview with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, who was droning on about how great the president and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist had been in the crisis.

Cooper got right up in her grille: “There are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians slap--you know, thanking one another, it just . . . kind of cuts them the wrong way . . . there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. . . . Do you get the anger that is out here?”

That was electrifying TV, and it turned out to be something of a watershed moment. After the storm, broadcast correspondents started to put aside their rote politeness in favor of a feistier interrogation of government officials. And Cooper, who had appeared overwhelmed and teary, invented a new kind of journalist: the newscaster as professional mourner.

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.

Look, I really like this guy and I hope he’s in television news forever, because, hey, even for a straight man, I find Anderson easy on the eyes. My advice to Cooper? No more tears. Stay frosty. Your emotional response to tragedy is not the story. I don’t need you to show me that you care. I need you to tell me what you know.