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Award-winning journalist Anderson Cooper talks career, election
YOUNGSTOWN
Award-winning journalist Anderson Cooper said the 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is unlike any that he has seen in his 24-year career.
Cooper, speaking to a full-house audience Saturday night at Stambaugh Auditorium, said he has great respect for people who throw their hat into the presidential ring, given what they have to go through.
This year, that will include a one-on-one debate that the CNN anchor will moderate on Oct. 9, along with ABC’s Martha Raddatz.
“What’s extraordinary about this presidential race is how engaged people are,” said Cooper, host of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”
He would not predict who the next president will be, saying, “I’m not a predictor. ” Nor would he reveal the questions he will ask Oct. 9.
However, he did talk about how he is preparing to moderate the debate in order to elicit information from the candidates that people need to know to be informed voters.
“My job is to be fair and ask tough questions,” he said.
To prepare, he said he is reading everything each candidate has said and done during the campaign and before.
He noted, though, that the debate is not about the moderator.
“It is about the candidates engaging each other,” he said.
The Yale University graduate, who holds a bachelor’s degree in political science, said he knew he was “screwed” job-wise when after his graduation the Berlin Wall came down.
Looking for career advice from his mother, the world-renowned designer Gloria Vanderbilt told him “follow your bliss,” which he said he found difficult.
It was during a trip to Burma and Somalia as a teen, where he had to “talk my way through a roadblock” and “had a gun pointed at me in anger for the first time” that he realized he had found his bliss – “what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”
“I had never seen death up that close ... bodies stacked up ... It was the first time I saw a child die,” Cooper said.
“I’d seen horror and hate and humanity as well. I realized I couldn’t stop the famine, but I could write about the people and tell their stories,” he said.
To succeed in his journalism career, Cooper said he decided to do what others didn’t want to do ... cover wars.
He has worked in more than 40 countries covering major news events including Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and the earthquake in Haiti.
While his career has been primarily in television, Cooper, responding to a question about the future of print journalism, said it is a shame what has happened to the newspaper business.
“I like nothing more than having a newspaper in my hands. I hope there is some economic model that will make it work,” he said.
He advised that people check the source of their information.
He said the tendency today is to read a blog and give it the same validity as a source that vets its information.
Cooper’s appearance was sponsored by the Youngstown State University Skeggs Lecture Series, and he was introduced by YSU President Jim Tressel.