Anderson Cooper said goodbye to “60 Minutes” on Sunday as the journalist exited the CBS News staple after 20 years in order to focus on CNN and his two kids.
He called his time on the show “the honor of a life” in his extended “60 Minutes Overtime” segment shared on Youtube, adding, “I will miss this.”
“So, this is crazy. This is my last shoot for ‘60 Minutes.’ ‘60 Minutes’ has always been a place, at least for me, that you get to step into somebody else’s shoes,” Cooper began. “You get to see things through their eyes and see what their struggles are and what they are facing and you learn from that.”
“I grew up watching ‘60 Minutes.’ I was a weird little kid, I liked watching news. After my dad died, there was a lot of silence in my house and we would watch the news over dinner,” he continued. “The oldtime CBS correspondents, I knew them all by name. I didn’t know them personally, but I felt like I did. I felt like as a kid, I was getting a kind of a look at adulthood and I was learning stuff. You never knew what you were going to get, but you were willing to go for the ride because you trusted the people on it that it was going to be a good story.”
The father of two also subtly acknowledged the changing tides at CBS: Bill Owens and Wendy McMahon both resigned following the Skydance-Paramount merger, while correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is reportedly about to depart after editor-in-chief Bari Weiss postponed her “Inside CECOT” story.
“I hope ‘60 Minutes’ remains ‘60 Minutes.’ There’s very few things that have been around for as long as ‘60 Minutes’ has and maintain the quality that it has. And things can always evolve and change and I think that’s awesome and things should evolve and change. But I hope the core of what ‘60 Minutes’ is always remains,” Cooper said. “I think the independence of ‘60 Minutes’ has been critical … and I think the trust it has with viewers is critical to the success of ‘60 Minutes.’”
He specifically name-dropped Bob Simon, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer and Ed Bradley as his personal inspirations at the newsmagazine (the series premiered in September 1968, while Cooper eventually joined in 2006).
“To me, what was great about ‘60 Minutes’ was the mix of stories — a hard-hitting piece of journalism, an investigative report,” he said. “The bar at ‘60 Minutes’ has always been so high to get a story on the air. Everybody [who] works at ‘60 Minutes’ is the best in their profession, the best at what they do — the best sound technician, the best camera person, the best producers, associate producers, the best editors.”
Elsewhere, the anchor picked some his favorite news items from the last two decades, while also poking fun at his own signature sign-off.
“The whole time I’ve done pieces at ‘60 Minutes,’ my full-time job has been over at CNN and still is. And it’s been really challenging to do the kind of work you need to do to have a great ‘60 Minutes’ piece on. You know, CNN doesn’t like it if I take a lot of time off to work on a ‘60 Minutes’ piece. So, I’ve worked mostly for ‘60 Minutes’ on weekends. You know, my vacation time at CNN has been working on ‘60 Minutes’ pieces, and I’ve loved it, but it’s it’s it’s been tough,” Cooper further noted. “I always imagined like, okay, when I don’t want to be in the daily news grind, I’d love to just tell ‘60 Minutes’ stories, but when I had kids, the reality of having kids is different than anything you can kind of imagine.”
“I’ve got a 4-year-old and a just-now-6-year-old and I want to spend as much time with them as I can while they still want to spend time with me. And those days, that clock is ticking,” he concluded. “When you see a ‘60 Minutes’ story and you’re like, ‘That was a really good story.’ It was a good story because it requires time and it requires patience. It requires money. And it requires an appreciation of the history and the sacrifices and the hard work of the people here. And I hope that’s known and honored and valued and continues. I hope ‘60 Minutes’ is around for when my kids grow up and have kids of their own and they can watch it with their kids.”
“60 Minutes” airs Sundays on CBS.
