Politics, say hello to pop culture
Despite his job as the face of serious news, Anderson Cooper says he’ll bring his ‘fun’ side to Toronto
Anderson Cooper is CNN.
And the network is seeing soaring ratings under Donald Trump’s presidency, with Cooper at the helm as the most recognizable face of the brand.
However, his own brand extends beyond the news channel: Cooper, 50, is also familiar to viewers as a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes. (His highly anticipated interview with adult-film star Stormy Daniels over her alleged affair with Trump is expected to air on that show March 25.)
Television was never far from Cooper’s life: the Yale graduate’s exposure started at the age of 3, as a guest on The Tonight
Show with his mother, socialite Gloria Vanderbilt. (His ancestors include Cornelius Vanderbilt, the shipping and railroad tycoon who founded the family fortune.)
Cooper is at Toronto’s Sony Centre March 24 with longtime friend and Bravo TV host Andy Cohen, the executive producer of the Real Housewives franchise, to talk about world events and pop culture in their first foray across the border. AC2: Anderson Cooper & Andy Cohen is billed as a night of “deep talk and shallow tales.”
The Star talked to Cooper about his talk-show tour and the state of journalism in perilous times. The interview (which was conducted before Cooper talked to Daniels) has been condensed and edited.
“I wouldn’t say it’s fun. But I can tell you it’s an exciting time to be in the news business, that’s for sure,” says Anderson Cooper, who’s in town March 24.
First of all, I don’t think I’ve watched as much CNN in my life. Just when I’m about to watch Game of Thrones, your president does something crazy. Can you tell him to slow things down? We run on a more leisurely news cycle north of the border.
(Laughs) It’s really been nonstop the last two years. What’s amazing is that normally you work all day for a broadcast for the night and then you have to throw it out. The show we were working on yesterday got scrapped because the New York Times broke a story around 10 p.m. or so, and we ended up going live with breaking news. How did the talk-show tour come about? You know critics have Andy to thank for begetting the Real Housewives franchise. And now we have the Real Housewives of Toronto and Vancouver. But I hear when he first met you he apparently just wanted to date that Vanderbilt boy.
Someone tried to set us up on a blind date that never happened. And we became great friends. We had the same circle of friends and started hanging out. He was a young producer at CBS News and I was a young correspondent at ABC News. I did an interview with him one time in New York about his book and it was so much fun. My agent was there and he said Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller used to go on this tour. It never occurred to us to do something like that. But we’ve done 30 or 40 shows already and we keep going. I once asked Dan Rather, who was fired from his job for getting a fact wrong on 60 Minutes, whether journalists are held to a higher standard than presidential candidates. That was just before the election. And since then, CNN has also fired journalists that didn’t get it right. What do you think of the situation now? Are you held to a higher standard than the White House and should you be?
I wouldn’t necessarily compare standards. But journalists should absolutely be held to the highest standard. It’s important that we’re correct and we’re right. At CNN we work very hard to make sure that happens. If a mistake happens you apologize for it and fix it as soon as you can. And make sure it doesn’t happen again. This is my pet peeve, and I’m sure you heard this before, but if someone is lying, whether it’s Democrat, Republican or the president, why don’t you just say they’re lying, instead of using euphemisms such as “falsehoods”? Why sugar-coat it? We do use the word lie. But you have to use it pretty selectively. A lie implies intent. It implies a desire to manipulate the facts. Sometimes it’s hard to know for sure whether it’s a misunderstanding or something more deliberate unless you’re in somebody’s head or you can prove a clear trail that somebody knows something demonstrably false. That to me is a pretty high bar. Your boss, Jeff Zucker, hired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as an analyst for CNN while, at the same time, he was still being paid by the Trump administration. So there you had someone who really wasn’t an analyst but a propagandist elevated on the same platform as someone relatively more objective. And there are other examples where CNN has put so-called analysts on air who are clearly shills. Does this kind of false equivalency damage the journalism you’re trying to do? How does that sit with you?
I certainly think CNN has a variety of people on the air. Some of them are objective analysts, some of them have affiliations. But we can make the same argument there are plenty of people at other networks who have worked for campaigns or are associated with campaigns. It’s important to have voices of people who have experience and who represent different points of view. And I understand if some viewers don’t like that, but I have no problem with people giving their view as long as they’re identified properly. We’re living in more partisan times. Are the days of the neutral, take-no-sides Walter Cronkite type anchor over? It seems that everyone has to have an opinion, everyone editorializes and now we expect that from our anchors.
I’m sort of old school. I try not to wear my opinion on my sleeve. But I try very hard to represent different sides of a debate. I don’t really express my opinion very often. I will challenge someone with facts. But it’s not my job to challenge someone with opinion. There’s plenty of shows that do that. And as an anchor your job is just to report facts and let people decide. Some days, given the language flying on the airwaves, I feel like I’m watching a Saturday Night Live parody. Now that you’re allowed to say “sh--hole” on the air, how much fun is that?
I wouldn’t say it’s fun. But I can tell you it’s an exciting time to be in the news business, that’s for sure. So what can we expect when you and Andy finally decamp in Toronto?
One of the great things about the tour is getting to know the city with one of your best friends. Andy likes to go days early to, as he says, “suss it out.” I’m not sure what that means. But I fully expect Andy will “suss out” Toronto for several days before I arrive. I really love Toronto, I think it’s a great city, but I don’t think Andy knows it very well, so I’m excited to bring him there.
But it’s not really about politics. People have enough of politics. It’s a night of fun. It’s just hanging out with us. We’re telling stories from the world of pop culture and news. It’s really designed just to make people laugh. Andy always says it’s the best version of me, because it’s a side that friends see of me when we hang out.