Anderson Cooper 360°, Newsnight

Anderson Cooper 360°

Airing weeknights at 7 pm on CNN

NewsNight

Airing weeknights at 10 pm on CNN

Has a newsman ever before vaulted into the TV pantheon with the speed of Anderson Cooper?

Two months ago, before his coverage of Hurricane Katrina made him an instant institution, the 38-year-old Cooper was merely the host of an above-average cable news show, "Anderson Cooper 360°," that professed to mix hard news and hip pop. Despite a resume suggesting reportorial tenacity and no matter the seriousness of his presentation, he was best known as a silver-haired pretty-boy-a mannequin for handsome suits in many a fashion spread, a son of the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and the subject of speculation among a certain subset of media addicts about which way he swings.

But after the deluge: Him! He was urgent and anguished, and he fought back tears on a live feed! According to the main line of opinion, in beating back the platitudes of Senator Mary Landrieu on September 1st-"I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians slap-you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now"-he crystallized the attitude of the Republic.

"Righteous indignation," said the Times. Check. Nice work. But to judge by the fuss, we had witnessed the second coming of Cronkite. Or even the birth of a hero on the order of Network's Howard Beale.

No hype being complete without a backlash, The New Republic pointed out that a few moments of aired outrage did not translate to the revolution's having been televised, and the San Francisco Chronicle-peevish in the weeks since CNN installed Cooper as the co-anchor of what had been "NewsNight with Aaron Brown"-went banana-crackers: "The Anderson Cooper cult of personality must end."

Must it? Last week's news that Cooper signed a million-dollar deal to write a memoir for HarperCollins would suggest that it's just starting. Cooper's agent has said it will detail the anchor's "life as a journalist and human being in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq and Louisiana/Mississippi." That "human being" bit is key. Cooper's whole thing is humility, approachability-"relatability," as they say in Hollywood.

Unlike the bygone Brokaw-Rather-Jennings triumvirate (or Brian Williams, his only current rival in big-league news reading and a prodigy of blow-dried hauteur), he is not the paternalistic type. He presents himself as a reporter rather than an authority, while Brown-whose mixture of pomposity and mock-folksiness makes him look like a parody of an anchorman-treats his co-star like a senior statesman humoring a whippersnapper. Cooper gives you the sense that he is deferring to his goofy uncle. His voice is anti-sonorous, as he stammers and stutters and you-knows, ticking off information as if he were a living newswire.