On Sunday evening, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was live on location in Tel Aviv, Israel, when alerts began blaring.
While you might not expect a moment that includes being forewarned that missiles were coming near you within in the next 10 minutes to be someone’s best work, I couldn’t help but watch Anderson Cooper and believe this was him at his best.
Cooper — along with fellow CNN correspondents Clarissa Ward and Jeremy Diamond — was evacuated from the network’s set as the alerts blared.
The situation was somewhat chaotic. It was 3:02 AM local time, and for the first time since he had arrived in the country on the brink of war with Iran, local messages were clear: there are missiles incoming.
That’s a bone-chilling moment at any moment. Let alone being on live television when it happened. It’s certain to complicate matters a little more.
But you never would have known that from Anderson Cooper’s on-air demeanor. He was cooler than a cucumber just pulled out of the freezer as he asked his colleagues if they had the technical capabilities to move the network’s operations underground as the missiles approached.
Other than an awkward laugh when he suggested to Ward that they should definitely heed the advice to the notifications and move away from their rooftop location, Cooper handled the developing situation with an unbelievable amount of grace and resolve.
His voice rarely, if ever, raised as he made his way to the basement of the hotel where the CNN crew was stationed in the Israeli city. Plenty of other cable networks or hosts would have been forced to cut to a different set, in a studio in some much safer locale. With Anderson Cooper at the helm, however, he slowly but surely meandered to a safe space, even having the wherewithal to say hello to the hotel’s guests as he moved his live television production underground, in addition to holding the door open for his camera crew and conducting an impromptu interview with Diamond and Ward as the trio waited for an elevator.
To me, it highlighted Anderson Cooper’s ability as a television host. When the (expletive) hits the fan, you learn a lot about the character of someone. I learned that the longtime CNN host is insanely cool under pressure. He didn’t act as if he was in imminent danger — and I’m sure critics will assert he wasn’t — or hardly flinch in the face of being in a city that was being bombed by a foreign adversary.
There will be a lot of coverage centered in the Middle East over the course of the coming days and weeks. Plenty of networks will have their opportunity to create viral moments by showing insanely daring footage from locations inside Israel and Iran.
But the first impression of the cable news coverage from the region that struck a major chord was Anderson Cooper atop the hotel roof for CNN. He captured and dominated the moment, showing why it’s important to have a seasoned veteran leading coverage of major events.
This was Anderson Cooper at his best. Calm, cool, collected. It would have been easy to have the exact opposite reaction. Instead, he showed his ability to understand the moment as both a person and a professional.
These moments are the reason viewers still turn to CNN in breaking news situations. For CNN, and for Cooper himself, it only reinforces the network’s place as the leader in breaking news coverage.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
