‘That Wasn’t Good’: Watch CNN’s Anderson Cooper Get Hit by Debris During Tense Coverage of Milton

I don’t expect everyone reads all the columns I write here at The Western Journal. However, a few weeks back, Anderson Cooper’s CNN show ran a preposterous segment — nearly 10 minutes in length — devoted to interviewing 10- and 11-year-olds about their thoughts on the presidential election. (Spoiler alert: Nothing insightful.)

At the time, I noted that Cooper had come up through the ranks as a serious journalist. His big break, in fact, was his thoughtful, somber coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Since Hurricane Helene was ravaging the East Coast of the U.S. at the same time Cooper was interviewing the prepubescent set, I had this to say: “How about focusing on the storm and leaving the kids to their parents, instead? Just a thought, Anderson.”

Well, now, with Hurricane Milton, we’ve seen how Cooper and CNN cover major storms almost two decades post Hurricane Katrina. And I have new advice for Anderson and his producers: OK, just go back to the kids’ hot political takes.

In viral footage that’s quickly come to epitomize everything terrible about how modern media outlets cover disasters, Cooper — who had decided to go out in the middle of the storm, because apparently we don’t know that hurricanes are dangerous and the moment needed dramatizing — determined that he was going to head back indoors after being hit in the face by a piece of debris.

Yeah, wise choice there. And, while we’re thankful that Mr. Cooper is, in fact, safe, the question is why he or his superiors felt this was necessary.

In grainy footage that demonstrated once and for all that, yes, hurricanes really are windy and/or watery, Cooper was reporting from the banks of the Manatee River in Bradenton, Florida, as Milton pounded the state’s Gulf Coast.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that if you’re an adult human being and desperately need to see what a hurricane looks like, there are a multitude of unmanned live cams that show you exactly what’s going on. In fact, just one Tampa station alone — WTVT-TV  — has no less than seven of them streaming as of 2 a.m. Thursday, Eastern Daylight Time.

But, no: CNN had to send a ridiculously highly paid adult male out into the storm to relate what it’s like to experience a hurricane. And boy, did he have some insights:

“The wind has really picked up,” Cooper said in the clip, which was aired shortly after 9 p.m. EDT.

“The water’s really moving. You can get a sense of just how fast the wind is moving there. You can see it in the light there. It is now just whipping off the Manatee River. It’s coming from kind of the north, I guess northeast. And the water now is really starting to pour over. If you look at the graph – whoa!”

And that’s when he was hit in the face with a piece of, well, something. Thankfully, it didn’t appear to be that heavy, because I don’t like people suffering grave injuries on live TV, but there you go:
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CNN’s Anderson Cooper hit by debris during Hurricane Milton coverage on CNN in Bradenton, Florida. pic.twitter.com/1KHoxUGek8

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) October 10, 2024

“OK, that wasn’t good,” Cooper said.

“I’ll probably go inside shortly. But you can see the amount of water here on the ground. Landfall.”

Wow. Landfall. Water. Debris. Wind. Almost like … a hurricane, the kind of storm that virtually every CNN viewer has either lived through or seen very detailed footage of.

This kind of needless send-a-guy-out-in-a-storm coverage is usually limited to daredevils who have made hurricane-braving stunts a personal trademark.

Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel — known among Floridians with a gallows sense of humor as “The Angel of Death” — is probably the most famous of this lot, but there’s always someone at every media outlet who wants to up their Instagram follower count. They’ll brave any storm to yell to whoever’s watching cable news at midnight, “THE WIND IS REALLY PICKING UP OUT HERE!! IT’S AMAZING HOW STRONG THIS IS!!” 

As if we didn’t know.

Cooper, meanwhile, is the closest thing CNN has to a bona fide on-air star still left after what feels like a few hundred reshuffles of talent at the Most Trusted Name in News™. He’s far beyond the days where he needs to barnstorm into a Category 3 hurricane to keep his job.

In fact, this is the kind of thing CNN should be protecting him from, not sending him into. I’m not saying anyone deserves this, mind you, but let’s just speak in cold, clinical, actuarial terms: If you’re going to risk one of your employees getting hit in the head with debris on air — an injury that could well be serious, if not fatal — maybe the feller who anchors your primetime lineup is not your guy.

Or maybe this is a hint to Anderson: He’s making a reported $12 million a year at a network where cuts are a constant. During Hurricane Helene, CNN ad him devoting 10 minutes of his show to a po-faced segment about what children thought about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Two weeks later, the network has him out in the middle of a Category 3 hurricane. Next week? Anderson flies 737 Max jets for 72 hours straight before a trip to the ISS onboard a Boeing Starliner, or something to that effect.

I jest, I think. The point is this: Unless they’re trying to make Cooper quit, CNN has become a circus-like farce of its former self. We don’t need anyone to be out in the middle of a hurricane to enlighten us to what a storm feels like, least of all the face of a network.

Stick to polling the kiddies, Mr. Cooper. Really.

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