Anderson Cooper 360: Ghost Written, Market Tested, Mother Approved

I like the name of his blog because it accurately depicts what happens when you read it: you end up in the same place you started. Then there's the subtext: by not using his real name, i.e. being Gloria Vanderbilt's child of priviledge, he's forgoing any ties to an institution of higher learning in addition to pretending to have gotten to his perch in life through any effort of his own.

I believe a weekly fisking is in order. Let's start with this week.

Anderson leads us off with the tempting title "3 Little Words That Changed A War". You might be led to think that Anderson has found some order from a key Iraqi figure that changed the course of the event. So what are Anderson's 3 little words? Improvised Explosive Device.

Pointing out that IED's have affected the outcome of the war is sort of like recently upgrading from a rotary phone. Perhaps Anderson is just getting a hold of this new phrase, "All that and a bowl of cherries" as well, having recently disregarded "Tubular to the max" as a bit passe. I imagine Anderson sitting in a Volvo listening to a news cut on IEDs in between singing along with "I Saw The Sun" and "Here Comes the Hot-Stepper" and thinking, "Hey, this IED stuff is blog material."

Except the end of the article is signed by someone named Barbara Starr. That's right...the Anderson Cooper blog is GHOST WRITTEN!!!! What does a talking head actually do all day that he can't put together a banal blog? How do you find other writers to contribute the appropriately banal blather that fits the Anderson Cooper image? Do they have focus groups churn out sentences? Perhaps they hire an advertising firm? Or perhaps they go the traditional route - take mediocre journalism students, crush the will to live out of them with a few years working the AP/Reuters beat, and then hand them a modest salary for what's left of their souls.

So let's find the last time the talking hair actually had something to say for himself - March 7th, when he eulogized his mother's friend. It's tough to fisk a eulogy. It might seem heartless. But let's begin - Andersoon Cooper can't write. When you want to eulogize someone, that would seem to be the time that you drop the 4th grade level stacatto that passes for Time-Life writing and break out those tricky 9th grade concepts - alliteration, consonance, simile, figurative language. But of course none of that is taught if 9th grade english because dipsticks like Andersoon Cooper need their A's.

Here's the real problem - everything. A hefty section of the eulogy is devoted to kissing up to mother Gloria, how progressive she is, how glorious in all ways. There are no less than 5 separate paragraphs dedicated to pre-eulogizing his mother and how cool she is with black people. Then, we're told the dearly departed was a great photographer, only to find the pictures sitting next to the blog, taken by the dead man to be completely non-descript. We're given no reference point for why this man's art was any good. The only quaint story we hear is how he used to lie to little children. And to wrap this menagerie of incompetence up, Anderson admits that he didn't even know the man was ill.

We have our first Mother's Day blog, running year round, on a major national website.

Anderson Cooper 360: Ghost Written, Market Tested, Mother Approved.