If you have followed the career of Anderson Cooper, he and his crew getting roughed up by Egyptian protesters is not surprising.
Back in the early-to-mid-1990s, Cooper was a star reporter for Channel One News, a 15-minute news program that gave advertisers a way into the classroom in exchange for free TVs. (It sounds nefarious, but it wasn’t such a bad trade-off.) Much of the show dealt with “serious teen issues” in the way one would expect such a show to deal with them – in a way that virtually guaranteed no credibility with the target audience.
The silver lining was Cooper’s reporting, which often put him in harm’s way:
Cooper dodged bullets to bring places like the Balkan peninsula into the classroom in a way history and social studies teachers could not, and he did this for a 15-minute show for a target audience that was probably ignoring the show to do the math homework I was supposed to do the night before. (I mean they… the math homework they were supposed to… aw, forget it.)
So it’s not all that shocking that, when the American news media finally got in the middle of the scrum in Egypt, it would be Cooper jumping in.
Jim Eltringham 