Choire Sicha on Anderson Cooper 360:

Right now, his show is pretty much everything it shouldn’t be, and I suspect he knows it. The relentless story-teasing of things that are coming “after the break” and “in the next hour” is awful — it’s like a 4:45 p.m. promo for a small-town affiliate’s local news program. The constant use of the phrase “breaking news” applied to items of dubious news value that were perhaps “breaking” between five and eight hours ago is insulting and actually enraging. Apparently there is also a live in-studio webcam, which I will never turn to, and there is a young woman with very smart glasses who comes and delivers little “breaking news” updates that I have already read on the internet in the afternoon elsewhere. Recently she brought in her dog.

There are a couple of issues at play here: For one, if CNN — a 24-hour news network — wishes to remain competitive with the 24-hour world wide web, then star journalists like Anderson Cooper need to offer more than mere reporting. The blogs are there for “breaking news”; evening television shows like Cooper’s are there to digest these issues and offer a few well thought-out insights before the morning news cycle begins.

Which is the other, more depressing problem about 360: Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, for all their own shortcomings, offer both incisive opinions and a non-invasive glimpse into who they are outside of the studio. As for Cooper? Forget about coming out of the closet, we don’t even really know his personal opinion of Proposition 8. For as much as I love him, he’s becoming somewhat of a handsome teleprompter.