Troubled Rich Boy Has No Training in Journalism!Anderson Cooper is a television journalist and news anchor for CNN's Anderson Cooper 360º.
Apparently network news decided they needed a news anchor who also doubles as an action figure. On CNN's Anderson Cooper 360º, Cooper can be seen reporting on hurricanes in gale-force winds or riding alongside Jeff Corwin on a tumultuous ride through the Amazon jungle. Cooper's disppassionate reporting in the midst of catastrophic events seems to have struck a cord of approval from viewers of network news.
Cooper is the second son born to Wyatt Emory Cooper and railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. He lost his father to heart complications at the age of ten. Ten years later, Cooper's older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide at the age of twenty-three when Cooper was twenty-one years old. Cooper also has two older half-brothers from his mother's previous marriage to English conductor Leopold Stokowski: Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski (1950) and Christopher Stokowski (1952).
After high school graduation, Cooper went to Africa on a survival trip where he contracted Malaria and later detailed the experience in his article, "Africa Was a Place to Forget and Be Forgotten in." After his trip to Africa, he then attended Yale University where he received a bachelor of arts in political science. After graduating from Yale, Cooper interned for the CIA and travelled to Vietnam where he studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.
It was his brother's suicide that ignited Cooper's curiosity to probe humanity and inspired him to become a journalist. Cooper has no formal journalist training. Upon leaving the CIA he began his career in journalism as a fact-checker for the juvenile news channel, Channel One.
While working for Channel One, Cooper took an unconventional approach to get his foot in the door of reporting.
He quit his job and travelled to Burma with his video camera where he began independently reporting on his travels. Cooper's career ambition combined with an emotional obsession with danger led him to travel and cover stories in war-
torn regions of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.
Cooper became an ABC News correspondent in 1995 before advancing to co-anchor of World News Now. He left braodcast news in 2000 to be the host of the ABC reality show The Mole. In 2001 he returned to broadcast news as co-anchor with Paula Zahn on CNN's American Morning. By 2002 he was CNN's prime time anchor and since has hosted CNN's New Year's Eve special from Times Square. In 2003 he became anchor of his self-named CNN news program Anderson Cooper 360º.
Cooper has maintained his interest in covering the extreme by putting himself in the middle of such events as Hurricane Dennis; confronting leaders about the government response while in the aftermath of Katrina; and covering a famine in Africa from a nearby town.
In 2006 Cooper's memoir Dispatches from the Edge was published and topped the The New York Times
best seller list in June of that year.
In 2006 Cooper appeared several times on Live with Regis and Kelly as a fill-in for Regis Philbin.
Cooper is elusive about his sexual orientation. | 
