"Anderson Cooper is my hero."

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Egypt revolt: CNN's Anderson Cooper sets the bar on courage with reporting in midst of Cairo chaos


Joanna Molloy

Originally Published:Thursday, February 3rd 2011, 6:00 PM
Updated: Thursday, February 3rd 2011, 6:34 PM




Anderson Cooper led the pack in coverage of the BP oil spill off the Gulf Coast last summer,
now he's braving serious harm on the streets of Cairo covering the chaos in Egypt.
Anderson Cooper is my hero.

The CNN anchor was attacked again today by an angry mob in Cairo. "Situation on ground in Egypt very tense," he tweeted. "Vehicle I was in attacked. My window smashed. All ok."

Wednesday, he was punched by at least ten pro-Mubarak rioters. The men then chased Cooper and his two-person crew for several blocks. "Don't run," Cooper was heard to say to his camerman Neil Hallsworth and producer Maryann Fox. Don't let them see you panic.

Later, barricaded in a small room with two CNN correspondents, Cooper read a tweet from the State Department urging American citizens to head out on a U.S. government plane first thing in the morning. He's still there. Don't run. Keep calm and carry on.

Katie Couric was menaced and Christiane Amanpour was reportedly jostled, Cooper even took a punch to the head and remained calm. And you know just by looking at those biceps bulging out of his trademark black tee that the dude could have clocked any one of those guys.

Yes, it was all captured on his Flip, and yes, CNN's ratings have gone up. Understandably. But Cooper's not doing this to boost ratings -- or his ego. You can feel his fear even as he sticks it out for the sake of the story.

In Haiti, after Cooper threw down his video camera to carry a bleeding child to safety, the Snarky People, like Michael Shaw, commented on Huff Post "Anderson Cooper: Please stop with your sensationalist and self-promoting tendencies."

He's brought courage to his studio reporting, castigating politicians who weren't doing enough for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and last month, calling out Minnesota Tea Partier Michele Bachmann on her cockamamie claim that the Founding Fathers "like John Quincy Adams... worked tirelessly until slavery was no more" and that skin color "didn't matter."

Cooper pointed out that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, and that John Quincy Adams wasn't even a founding father. He's changed the role of the news anchor. "I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away," Cooper told MediaBistro's David Hirschman. "The all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don't think the audience really buys that anymore." Especially after Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert popped the pomposity bubble, and Cooper gets that.

But the 43-year-old newsman has been courageous for years, diving right into the center of fury like the best of the life-risking foreign correspondents. When he couldn't get a job answering phones at ABC (a Yale grad who's the great-great-great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt? Who did get the job -- Prince Harry?), Cooper simply bought a video camera, snuck across the border of scary scary military dictatorship Myanmar, and started sending freelance reports to Channel One.

Later, when ABC finally came to its senses and hired him, Cooper travelled to the most dangerous parts of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda so that he would be able to show a disbelieving world evidence of the genocide there. It's all the more remarkable precisely because there are members of Cooper's social class who travel mostly to places like Gstaad or St. Barth's, and work only on their tans.

And you know what? It takes cajones to host New Year's in Times Square with Kathy Griffin, especially after her dirty little faux pas in 2009.

Thursday, after reports that the BBC's equipment had been seized and correspondents from the NY Times, Washington Post, and Al-Jazeera had been detained, we asked CNN if the network would haul Cooper home. "We're watching the situation minute by minute," said CNN's Shimrit Sheetrit. "It's dicey, and it's constantly changing. Anderson is staying for now."