The End of the Page

Dispatches From The Edge: The Silver Fox Sadly Shines

by Luke Goldstein

The guy behind me is staring at me, right? I totally feel it.

Rating: 9 out of 10

It is expected now for any member of the political beltway or those who report on it (and other daily news events) to grace the shelves of our local bookstores (or the front page of our eBook apps) with a tell-all/biography/memoir. Most are pushed on them by overzealous managers and agents trying desperately to cash in on their popularity with various demographics, but every now and again one journal will come to fruition from a much more real and meaningful purpose.

Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disaster, and Survival is a touching remembrance from CNN superstar Anderson Cooper. Covering portions of his childhood and the darker moments of his youth, it also details heart-wrenching details of his reporting on Hurricane Katrina and the wars in the Middle East. Filled with honest and frank recollections from not only the front lines of some of our most recent calamities, Cooper also pushes his investigations internally to find out what drives him to consistently drop himself into some of the worst places on Earth.

The first thing that grabbed me about this book was the random similarities I didn’t expect to share with Anderson Cooper. His father passed away when he was ten years old, mine when I was five. It had a dramatic effect on each of our lives. He mentions his inability to fully process the emotional impact of that event, and the later suicide of his older brother, as key reasons for his apparent addiction to placing himself in the literal and psychological cross-hairs of the worst spots in the world.

Some of the most interesting parts, including those about his personal life, are when Cooper reveals many of the things he saw that never made the news, things deemed unworthy of CNN coverage. One scene talks about when he was in the Middle East passing out over 200 gallons of water to locals with the help of our armed forces. No one died that day, no IEDs went off, so no one ever heard about it. Cooper sadly admits the old adage that still holds sway over all news coverage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Another story mentions gruesome and horrific details about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The utter lawlessness committed not only by the locals taking advantage of the chaos, but law enforcement personnel who devolved just as much into primitive gangs of roving warlords. Some of those stories were snuffed out early on because it was deemed too dangerous in risking a possible backlash against all authority, which very well could have happened, but it doesn’t make the reality of it any easier to swallow.

Cooper also eloquently covers his tenuous balancing act between being an unbiased reporter and an opinionated celebrity. Once he made it out the other end of some incredibly dangerous job hunting tactics, landing in the spotlight of CNN forever altered his ability to reach millions of people and also his struggle to keep his sanity. He now was given access to people and events ranging from awe-inspiring to nightmare-inducing. With great skill and strain he has always come from those places knowing he had to wrap those images into a coherent story meant to inform, educate and enhance the world discussion. The Achilles heel for any reporter is to somehow deliver that information without bias and political overtones, which Cooper has managed to do time and time again, making him one of the most respected in the business.

In the last couple of years, Cooper has begun to step out of the middle ground and reposition himself as a true fact finder in a much more aggressive sense. Under the moniker, “Keeping Them Honest”, Cooper began bringing on politicians and other notable news makers when he felt something they were preaching about was demonstrably false. No longer fulfilled by calmly reporting the facts to his audience, Cooper decided to drive the falsehoods out into the light during live interviews. The only down side is if he brings on someone from the right side of the political spectrum and corrects them, Cooper becomes labeled a liberal activist, and if the guest is more left leaning, Cooper becomes labeled a political tool for the right. It seems like a no-win situation for him, but he is taking it in stride, sticking to what he believes is meaningful for people to know and that is what keeps him cemented as one of the best in the industry. Dispatches tries to ride that thin line as well, pointing out the inequities in the reporting that most of the country saw, while not coming down as an outright attack on the media as a whole.

The End of the Page recommendation: Dispatches From The Edge is a harrowing and heartfelt look in front and behind the lens of one of the most notable newsmen in the business, Anderson Cooper.

Daily Musings 3/3

1 – Now Google has finally reached the point of full cultural integration. A young, upcoming flash-in-the-pan Hip Hop star, named Teyana Taylor, has released a track under the masterful hands of Pharell called Google Me. Click here to listen to it [via PerezHilton]. Honestly, the beat and the flow = good stuff, the chorus and concept = borderline retarded.

2 – Back in the day it seems the Hell’s Angels were dangerous on land, but completely inept on the water. They hatched a plot to kill Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones but failed in prime hilarious fashion:

“Mangold said the men tried to reach Jagger by sea. “The boat was hit by a storm and all of the men were thrown overboard,” he was quoted as saying. They all survived but made no other attempt on his life, Mangold said.”

I don’t know who this Mangold person is, but he should be getting phone calls from the studios right about…now! This has all the trapping of Will Farrell’s next mildly entertaining Saturday afternoon movie fare. [via The Superficial]

3 – A final goodbye to Jeff Healey. I won’t write out his whole bio, since the people over at Starpulse have already done such a great job of it, but I will say that Angel Eyes is an amazing song and is in heavy rotation in my “Heartwrenching Songs of the Eighties” folder in ITunes. What? You don’t have a folder like that on your computer? Uh huh. Sure, I believe you. Oh, in case you didn’t know the other amazing thing about this truly talented guitarist, he was blind. Yep, now don’t you feel productive?

4 – Marion Cotillard went from being the widely respected winner of the Best Actress Oscar for Mome La to being the widely chuckled at actress who made some badly worded comments about the 9/11 attacks and the landing on the moon:

The Daily Mail says:

“I think we’re lied to about a number of things,” Cotillard said, singling out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the US making up horror stories for political ends.
“We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”
She added that the towers, planned in the early Sixties, were an outdated “money-sucker” that would have cost more to modernise than to rebuild altogether, which is why they were destroyed.
She said: “It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them.”

“Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell me, that’s for sure.”

[via Tyler Durden]

So what did we learn here today? First off, never give awards to the French, they just don’t appreciate it. Secondly, never say something in a interview you can’t blame on too much cough syrup. Lastly, there are indeed still people who don’t believe we’ve landed on the moon, even though we can send robots to Mars. Sure, that makes total sense. I’m going to go back to banging my head against a wall until more knowledge and facts fall out.

5 – Simon Pegg has blasted Warner Brothers and McG for the complete mishandling of his creation, the TV show Spaced. Evidently the pattern of stealing witty and intelligent comedies from Britain and repackaging them, making them terrible and keeping the same name does make some of the original British creators a bit miffed.  [via FilmDrunk]

6 – The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just finished a two day visit to Iraq and he wrapped up the whole affair by saying “No one likes the U.S.” OK, I’ll admit we are not the most loved country in the world as we would like people to think. It’s not all teddy bears and rose parades when we come to town, but coming from Iran that statement holds just a little bit more irony. When Switzerland or Jamaica starts saying no one likes us, then I’ll be worried about our global image. If we are only being bad mouthed by crazy dictators who continue to talk about wiping other countries off the planet and ignoring absolutely huge parts of world history, I think we are still in the safe zone then.  [via CNN]

7 – I was really hoping for a cool red beam or some nifty sound effects when I clicked on a link that said “Shoots Reporter with Ray Gun”.  But it turns out this is an actual weapon, not one in my imagination, so it’s not nearly as cool. [via GorillaMask]

8 – Office Dare for the day: Ask a female colleague if you may borrow a lipstick. Then pocket it and walk away.

9 – It seems we can’t stop the battle for worst movie ever made this year. In the last few months we’ve seen Blond Ambition open to $64 per screen average, then The Hottie and The Nottie came in with a whopping $2,000 weekend total, now we get Witless Protection which is currently running a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and is officially being turned away by Canadian theaters. I hear someone shouting, it’s soft but you can just make it out, it sounds like Uwe Boll yelling, “See!! Someone is worse than me!!!” [via FilmDrunk]

10 – Ummmm…ouch: