Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 11:50 am
Actually, no maybe's about it. He is in fact one of the better reporters on CNN that I can even stand to watch.
He was fortunate enough to have the means to do those things that developed his talents and had the cojones to pull them off.
One of the best reality programs that I could actually stand watching was his "Mole". Too bad it didn't take.
The guy's got a lot talent.
He was fortunate enough to have the means to do those things that developed his talents and had the cojones to pull them off.
One of the best reality programs that I could actually stand watching was his "Mole". Too bad it didn't take.
The guy's got a lot talent.
StJohnRuth wrote:Maybe you're right. Obviously the guy's brilliant and motivated and that certainly comes from somewhere.
From wikipedia:
"After Cooper graduated from Yale University, he tried unsuccessfully to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones. He instead took a job as fact-checker for the much smaller Channel One, which produces a youth-oriented news program that is broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States.
After six months, Cooper decided that he wanted to switch to reporting, but
"figured if I told anyone, they wouldn't give me the chance [...] I quit my job and moved overseas and started shooting with my own video camera. I figured if I put myself in situations where there weren't many Americans around and I shot little stories, then I could sell them to Channel One. I wanted to make it impossible for them to not put me on air. [...] I had a friend of mine make a fake press pass on a Macintosh, and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government. I had met the person who was involved in the Burmese student movement in New York, and they gave me the name of a contact in a town in Western Thailand. So I found my way to this town that was like a Wild West border town, and I contacted the person and said I was a reporter. We met in an ice cream parlor, and then they agreed to take me in, and they smuggled me across the border into Burma."[3]
After reporting from Burma, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year and then returned to filming stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Haunted by his brother's suicide, Anderson explains, "The only thing I really knew is that I was hurting and needed to go someplace where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside." Cooper describes himself as having become "fascinated with conflict" during this dangerous period of his life in which he was occasionally shot at. While "witnessing history" was an incentive for him to report from such locales,
"I also found that I felt that the molecules in the air were different. In all the places where there was conflict it was sort of a highly charged atmosphere and there was something about it that appealed to me. I found I was very interested in issues of survival and why some people survive and others don't. I wanted to see first-hand. I felt very comfortable in those places.""