Anderson Cooper

Cooper at Qualcomm Stadium during the October 2007 California wildfires

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, which produces a youth-oriented news program that is broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States.[15] Cooper then entered Myanmar on his own with his forged press pass and met with students fighting the Burmese government.[13] He was ultimately able to sell his home-made news segments to Channel One.

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 Hi-8 camera with him, Cooper soon began filming and assembling reports of Vietnamese life and culture that aired on Channel One. He later returned to filming stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

On assignment for several years, Cooper had very 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."[8] One particular incident, however, snapped him out of it:

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."[8]

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.[13]

Cooper was also a fill-in co-host for Regis Philbin for the TV talk show Live with Regis and Kelly in 2007 when Philbin underwent triple-bypass heart surgery.[16] As of 2019, he still periodically serves as guest co-host on Live when one of the two hosts cannot go into work.

Cooper 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."[13] 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.

On September 8, 2003, Cooper became the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN. Describing his philosophy as an anchor, he has said:

I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away, the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don't think the audience really buys that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don't buy it. I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don't know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don't know as long as you say you don't know it. I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem.[13]

In 2005 Cooper covered a number of important stories, including 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.

Cooper at the inauguration of President Obama in Washington, D.C., 2009

In 2005, during CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 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.”[7] 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."[17]

In September 2005 the format of CNN's NewsNight was changed from 60 to 120 minutes to cover the unusually violent hurricane season. 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."[18] Following the addition of Cooper, the ratings for NewsNight increased significantly; Klein remarked that "[Cooper's] name has been on the tip of everyone's tongue."[19] To further capitalize on this, Klein announced a major programming shakeup on November 2, 2005. Cooper's 360° program would be expanded to 2 hours and shifted into the 10 pm ET slot formerly held by NewsNight, with the third hour of Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room filling in Cooper's former 7 pm 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.[20]

In early 2007 Cooper signed a multi-year deal with CNN that would allow him to continue as a contributor to 60 Minutes, as well as doubling his salary from $2 million annually to a reported $4 million.[21]

In 2007 he began hosting CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, a show which honors and recognizes extraordinary deeds by ordinary people.

In October 2007 Cooper began hosting the documentary Planet in Peril, with Sanjay Gupta and Jeff Corwin on CNN. In 2008, Cooper, Gupta, and Lisa Ling from National Geographic Explorer teamed up for a sequel, Planet in Peril: Battle Lines, which premiered in December 2008.[22][23]

In September 2010 Warner Bros. and Telepictures (both corporate siblings of CNN) announced that Cooper had signed an agreement to host a nationally syndicated talk show. The journalist Brian Stelter (at the time employed by The New York Times, and now by CNN), reported on Twitter that the new Warner Bros. daytime talk show would be named Anderson (now titled Anderson Live).[24] The show premiered on September 12, 2011,[25] and, as part of negotiations over the talk show deal, Cooper signed a new multi-year contract with CNN to continue as the host of Anderson Cooper 360°.[26][27] On October 29, 2012, it was announced that Anderson Live would end at the conclusion of its second season. The show, slightly renamed after season one and revamped with a variety of co-hosts, failed to achieve the ratings distributor Warner Brothers hoped for. The final Anderson Live aired on May 30, 2013.

Along with Martha Raddatz, Cooper moderated the second presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.[28] This made him the first openly gay person to moderate a presidential debate in the general election.[29]

In 2017 Andy Cohen joined Cooper in succeeding Kathy Griffin as co-host of CNN's New Year's Eve coverage.[30][31] They again co-hosted CNN's New Year's Eve for 2018.[32]

Cooper at the 71st Annual Peabody Awards (Astoria Hotel, May 21, 2012)

Cooper has been a correspondent for the CBS News program 60 Minutes since 2007, while concurrently serving as a CNN anchor and correspondent.

Andy Cohen and Cooper announced that they would be going on a national tour to perform their conversational stage show AC2 beginning in March 2015.[33][34] The tour opened in Boston, followed by Miami Beach, Chicago and Atlanta.[34] The idea for the show came about after Cooper interviewed Cohen about his then-latest book, The Andy Cohen Diaries, at an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.[35][36] Since then, the two-man show has continued to tour, reaching over 50 cities as of October 2018.[37]

Cooper was the narrator for the 2011 Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, directed by Rob Ashford and starring Daniel Radcliffe.[38]

A freelance writer, Cooper has authored a variety of articles that have appeared in many other outlets, including Details magazine.[39]

In May 2006 Cooper published a memoir for HarperCollins, Dispatches from the Edge, detailing his life and work in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq and Louisiana over the previous year. Some of the book's proceeds are donated to charity.[40] The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list on June 18, 2006.[41]

In 2017 Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, co-authored The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss. Complied from a series of emails, the memoir recounts their shared past, and Vanderbilt's tumultuous childhood. Cooper said his goal in writing the book and correspondence was to leave "nothing left unsaid" between the pair.[42] It landed on multiple best-seller lists the year of its publication.[43]