Twenty years after appearing on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” Anderson Cooper is bidding farewell to the show, explaining that it was “tough” balancing the show with being a CNN anchor and raising his son.
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Anderson Cooper is ending his 20-year career.
The CNN anchor, 58, said goodbye to “60 Minutes” on the May 17 episode of the news magazine show, which was his final broadcast as a correspondent. After the season finale, which featured Cooper’s reporting on London’s taxi industry in the era of self-driving cars, CBS News released a lengthy farewell interview with Cooper.
Cooper got emotional as he sang the final line, “I’m Anderson Cooper.” After choking for a few seconds and looking down, choking back tears, he looked straight into the camera and said this line three times, a staple of the show.
During the “Overtime” segment, Cooper reminisced about the “dangerous” and “stupid” things he did for the show, including diving with a Nile crocodile and going “temporarily” blind while riding a jet ski over giant waves in Portugal.
A montage of familiar faces showed Cooper’s interviews with Prince Harry, Lady Gaga and the late Donald Sutherland, but Cooper seemed to be looking back fondly on his impactful sit-down interviews with lesser-known “fascinating people” such as Holocaust survivors and those fighting child malnutrition in Niger.
“The important thing is that it never feels like work. You feel like you’re stepping into people’s lives and being invited into people’s homes,” Cooper explained. “You’re invited into their fight, and you’re invited into everything that led them to be on 60 Minutes.”
Anderson Cooper found it ‘really difficult’ to balance CNN’s ’60 Minutes’
At the beginning of the segment, Cooper revealed how he grew up watching “60 Minutes” and knew the names of all the “old CBS correspondents.”
“I was a strange kid. I loved watching the news. After my father passed away, it was very quiet in the house and I would watch the news while eating dinner,” Cooper said. That’s why when Cooper was hired in 2006, he “couldn’t believe I was on 60 Minutes.”
However, serving as the anchor for “Anderson Cooper 360°” while also sometimes traveling the world to report for “60 Minutes” placed a heavy burden on the journalist.
“During the time I’ve been producing “60 Minutes,” my full-time job at CNN has ended and continues, and it’s been really hard to do the work it takes to make great “60 Minutes,” Cooper said.
He continued, “CNN doesn’t like me taking a lot of time to work on 60 Minutes stuff, so I’ve been working on 60 Minutes exclusively on the weekends. My time off at CNN has been spent working on 60 Minutes stuff. And I loved it, but it was hard.”
Cooper said he knew it was time to step away from the CBS News program to watch his sons, Wyatt and Sebastian, grow up.
“I have two children who are 4 and 6 years old, and I want to spend as much time with them as possible while they still want to spend time with me,” Cooper said. “And I think that clock was ticking back then.”
“I hope 60 Minutes is something I can watch with my kids when they grow up and have kids of their own,” he added.
Anderson Cooper also leaves CBS News
Cooper, who joined “60 Minutes” in 2006, announced he was quitting as a correspondent in February, saying he needed to spend more time with his children. He will remain an anchor at CNN.
“We are grateful that (Cooper) has dedicated so much of his life to this broadcast and understand the importance of spending more time with his family,” CBS said in a February statement, adding, “If he ever wanted to return, ’60 Minutes’ would be here for him.”
Mr. Cooper’s departure was announced during a tumultuous time for CBS News, which replaced Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief in October. The hiring of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison drew intense attention given that Weiss, a former New York Times opinion writer and Free Press founder, had no experience in broadcast news.
In December, Weiss came under fire for his decision to cut off a “60 Minutes” segment on the infamous Salvadoran prison CECOT hours before it was scheduled to air. CBS said the production required additional coverage, and it was ultimately aired the following month.
Amid the “60 Minutes” controversy, Nikki Glazer, who hosted January’s Golden Globe Awards on CBS, called CBS News “the best place to find the latest BS news in America.”
CBS has also undergone several changes since Weiss took over, including the departure of Maurice Dubois and John Dickerson from the CBS Evening News. Tony Dokoupil took over as anchor of the evening news show in January.
Contributor: Melina Khan, USA TODAY
