Anderson Cooper's Impact On American Journalism

For decades the world has relied on journalism as a form of gathering news and information. There are different types of journalism, including: investigative, news, reviews, columns and feature writing. The way people acquired this information has changed over the years and for the better of course. Technology has allowed for new innovations in the industry and better ways of transmitting news to the world. However, the main purpose of journalism is defined by something more basic, journalism focuses on the function news plays in the lives of people. Its goal is to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments (Campbell,
Martin,
Anderson Cooper was born on June 3, 1967 in New York City, NY as Anderson Hays
Cooper. He was born to Wyatt Emory Cooper, a writer, and Gloria Vanderbilt, an entrepreneur.
Early in his life Cooper was exposed to his mother’s glamorous lifestyle and the media. He
Growing up Cooper was influenced by two tragic events that have shaped him into what he is today. In 1977, when he was only eleven years old, Cooper’s father died in an open-heart surgery after several heart attacks. A couple years later when he was a senior in college, he suffers another tragic lost and this was the death of his brother. Cooper had an older brother named Carter who suffered from depression. Carter committed suicide by jumping out of the
14th-floor window of their mother's New York City apartment in front of her. As a college graduate and after losing his brother, Cooper decided he wanted to go into journalism. He was mostly interested in the war zone, which somehow connected to his family’s tragedies. Covering wars were logical to him because he was still questioning why his brother did what he did. In an interview, he expressed that after his brother’s death, he became interested in questions