Although not formally trained in journalism, Anderson Cooper is certainly the big hitter at CNN. He has his own evening show on CNN called Anderson Cooper 360 which he has hosted for 8 years and he runs live, normally from New York or a place of newsworthy interest.

Anderson Cooper entered the limelight at an early age with his mother being Gloria Vanderbilt, the famous fashion designer and heiress and his father being the writer Wyatt Emory Cooper. He appeared in television shows and modeled as a child.

He has had quite a varied life and career and spent a lot of time on the ground in war torn areas like Rwanda, Burma and Vietnam. He had a spell on ABC news, ending as co-anchor of a nightly news show. In his current CNN news show, Anderson Cooper tries to go behind the news stories to get different takes on the issues involved.

Recently, Anderson Cooper started his own daytime talk show called ‘Anderson’ – perhaps in a bid to fill the slot left empty by the Oprah show recently and to get a bigger hold on a possible global audience, outside of the major news niche.  Reviews of the new show, also showing on CNN, were mixed in the first week, but it will obviously take time for the show to bed in and for Cooper to get used to finding out what audiences want to see.

In the meantime this is just another stepping stone for the attractive, silver-haired American.