The Voice Of The Gulf Coast

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Cooper Becomes Loud Voice for Gulf Residents


Reporter Anderson Cooper of CNN on an assignment with Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
By Brian Stelter
Published: June 17, 2010

“There aren’t any small people here,” the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said from Louisiana on his prime-time program Wednesday night, emphatically rejecting the remarks by BP’s chairman that the oil company cares “about the small people."

Mr. Cooper listed some of the local men and women who had been put out of work by BP’s gusher of oil under the Gulf of Mexico, and concluded, “This is a land of giants.”

Some commentators dismissed Mr. Cooper’s unusual show-opener as shtick. But he has become one of the loudest media voices on behalf of gulf residents, reprising a role he played in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Where Oil Has Made Landfall on the Gulf Coast

Mr. Cooper has spent more time in Louisiana — about 20 days — than any other national television anchor since the leak began. Evincing his frustration and his perseverance, he keeps a daily on-air tally of the number of days BP has ignored his interview requests. “I think there’s a basic lack of transparency in their dealings,” he of BP, in an interview.

Mr. Cooper’s 10 p.m. program, “AC360,” and others like it have gained notice for trying to hold BP and the government accountable for the oil leak and the cleanup effort. As the crisis nears the two-month mark, there are signs that the news media are taking on a more adversarial role, just as they did after Hurricane Katrina and the widespread flooding of New Orleans.

On Tuesday, for instance, when government and corporate officials said up to 60,000 barrels were leaking each day, Mr. Cooper showed a damning series of video clips from May and early June of officials giving vastly lower estimates of the number of gallons spilled. Then he pointedly reminded viewers that BP had previously dismissed an estimate of 70,000 barrels as “alarmist.”

“Well,” he said, “sound the alarms.”

The oil spill gradually gained attention in late April and early May, and since then it has been the country’s dominant news story, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks weekly news coverage. The coverage took a discernible and more aggressive turn last week as “questions about the effectiveness of the response by well owner BP and the government gained a larger share of attention,” the senior director for the project, Jon Morgan, wrote on its Web site.

Other journalists share Mr. Cooper’s adversarial style. Moments after President Obama’s Oval Office address on Tuesday night, a Bloomberg Television reporter in Louisiana, Lizzie O’Leary, challenged the president’s claim that the federal government has been in charge of the cleanup. In her four weeks on the ground, “that’s just not what I’ve seen,” Ms. O’Leary said on Bloomberg, asserting instead that BP was taking the lead in some areas and that there was confusion over who is in charge. “The facts contradict the president,” she said.

The next morning, an NBC reporter, Tom Costello, concluded on MSNBC that “both the government and BP have a huge credibility problem here.”

Although cable newscasts have a reputation for generating more heat than light, they have been devoting more time to the crisis than other sectors of the news media, Mr. Morgan found, and have been big stages for complaints. Most nights that Mr. Cooper is along the gulf, he talks to the Plaquemines Parish president, Billy Nungesser, who describes the daily struggle to stop the oil from further hurting the region’s marshes and beaches. On Wednesday, Mr. Nungesser told him, “I still can’t look you in the eye and tell you I know who is in charge.”

Mr. Cooper said that there are “many nights where I, and I think my guests, feel like we’re shouting into a wind tunnel.”

That said, a conversation between Mr. Obama and Mr. Nungesser on June 1 indicates that the White House has taken note of Mr. Cooper’s broadcasts. As Mr. Nungesser recounted on CNN, Mr. Obama “made me commit and I agreed that, if we have the same mess-up in chain of command, or things not getting done, that I will give him a call at the White House before I call you, Anderson.”

Mr. Nungesser thanked Mr. Cooper in the appearance on CNN that night, saying “you’ve been a great help here.”

The oil spill coverage has been a “defining moment” for Mr. Cooper, said Verne Gay, the television critic for Newsday, in an e-mail message. Calling the broadcasts “remarkably combative and appropriately so,” Mr. Gay said “it all has an almost old-fashioned muck-raking quality to it.” Inside CNN, Mr. Cooper is Mister Disaster, first among American anchors to arrive in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the morning after the earthquake there in January, and among the last to leave. He says he has always been drawn to places of conflict, that and he feels an obligation to take television viewers there too. “I’m lucky to work at a place that’s interested in having me go to the front lines,” he said.

Mr. Cooper said that his program requests interviews with BP executives every day, but that he has been denied any access since May 19. (Other CNN anchors have been granted interviews and tours since that date.)

Mr. Cooper said that he finds it “odd.” He also said that he was amazed that the company has not allowed more cameras onto the rig and into the engineering room. “They have a remarkable story. They’re working very hard. And nobody sees that,” he said, quickly adding, “They’re not allowing anybody to see that.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 18, 2010, on page A19 of the National edition.