What local public affairs shows can learn from ‘Anderson’

For many years now, Anderson Cooper has made a name for himself as a rather dour but hardworking and principled broadcast journalist. He’s courageously covered wars, revolutions and disasters worldwide, risking his life to bring the news, as it’s happening, to viewers who appreciate the unusual combination of immediacy and thoughtful analysis that have become the hallmarks of his work.

While he’s become popular and acclaimed, however, Cooper has tended to be a rather cool and arch operator, unlike his more gung-ho colleagues. Perhaps in cognizance of this potentially “distancing” aspect of his public personality, the broadcast TV host has just unveiled his newest show, which focuses on his softer, more human and less hard-news side.

Significantly enough, the program, telecast weeknights at 7  here on Talk TV, is titled, not “Anderson Cooper,” but simply “Anderson”—making him the only male TV host to join the exclusive club of other “one-name” TV talk exponents like “Oprah,” “Ellen” and “Martha.”

The program title’s more personal projection is intended to make Cooper more empathetically accessible to viewers. To date, his public image has resisted this more open and vulnerable thrust, but he obviously wants to do something else, something more, so “more personal” it is!

We watched the first two telecasts of “Anderson,” and can report that the show is achieving its objective. Its first telecast, on the huge problem of bullying in US schools, enabled Cooper to reveal his emotional side, as he talked to the parents of two teenage victims of bullying, who killed themselves to put an end to their misery.

The second telecast was less fraught with pain and grief, and revealed the host’s more show biz side, as he dished with the likes of Paula Abdul and Morgan Freeman. Cooper didn’t give Ryan Seacrest any reason to worry that he might be losing his job soon, but he did unbend somewhat, and his stuffy public persona lost some of its starch.

Aside from Cooper’s performance on his new show, its best suit is the hard work and attention to detail that obviously goes into each telecast.

On local TV, public affairs talks shows are generally produced in a much lazier way, with only a couple of interviewees invited per telecast. As a result, the interviews tend to be too long, unnecessarily detailed and therefore unable to cover the topic or issue at hand in a sufficiently comprehensive and insightful way.

To make things worse, interviewers don’t do enough real research on the topic, and generally think they’re smart enough to just wing it, and survive. Alas, most of the time, they don’t.

On “Anderson,” the bullying issue was covered from many different perspectives, with various guests representing the victims’ families, school officials, psychologists, lawmakers, even some teens who’ve done the bullying. As a result, the complex problem was more sufficiently covered, to everyone’s enlightenment. Why can’t Cooper’s local counterparts be as thorough and genuinely pro-viewer in their work?

Why, indeed?