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“Think of this as Harvard’s feast day for the First Amendment and all the freedoms that it protects,” announced Nancy Gibbs at the start of the from the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, presented at the John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum.  

The Goldsmith Awards were founded in 1991 by the Greenfield family, who have sponsored the program ever since. Trustees Jill Greenfield Feldman, Rachel Feldman, Debra Feldman, Bill Epstein, Samantha Clark, Mike Greenfield, Joan Greenfield, and Bill Greenfield were all present in the Forum.

As part of the awards presentation, Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center and the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy, hosted a fireside chat with 2025 recipient of the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism, Anderson Cooper.

Cooper is the anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, and his podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper, and he is a regular correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes.

After playing video congratulations from Cooper’s media colleagues, Gibbs admitted she was tempted to talk about his illustrious path but was “duty bound to lead with the news” and asked Cooper for his thoughts on current events.

“This administration has a sense of what levers to pull that have never been pulled before in ways that are so far very effective,” said Cooper. “There are levers now that can be manipulated and used in ways that haven’t been done before, and it's very effective and it’s incredibly alarming,” he said.

“I think there’s been a big evolution in media in the United States around ratings and the ownership of these companies and the expectation for media centers to be profit centers for larger corporations. I think that has added to the vulnerability of reporting today, the vulnerability of journalism that today is targeted,” Cooper continued. “We’re seeing that play out in a number of realms right now.”

Why then, Gibbs wondered, are we not seeing media organizations stand up for one another, present a unified front?

Everyone, Cooper said, is trying to figure it out what it means in their own world.  

“The corporate ownership of news was not something I ever really paid attention to. It had no bearing on my job. I never heard from those people. I never thought about the business side of things,” said Cooper. “And to suddenly see these levers being pulled, it’s alarming. I don’t know where it’s going. I think we’re obviously in an unprecedented situation.”

Part of figuring it out means working through newer, alternative sources of information providers, the social media platforms, podcasts, and online interview programs that completely bypass traditional media.

“The way stories are told is always evolving,” Cooper said. “The Vietnam War correspondents who I studied as a kid and looked up to—the way they were able to tell stories, it took days for film that was shot in Vietnam to get to Japan and then finally end up on American televisions. We can now go places that journalists back then could have never considered going and report live. We are often ahead of relief workers or the military in some circumstances. I think having platforms like TikTok, if you can figure out a way to tell stories on them, that’s great.”

Cooper sees new platforms as a remarkable opportunity for storytelling, and an exciting challenge for journalists.

“I was covering the L.A. fires and while everybody was going to Pacific Palisades, I thought, ‘you know what? Let's go to Altadena.’ I just drove to a street corner where there was fire all around. While my crew were getting ready, I went on Instagram and shot a bunch of stories while things were blowing up around me and put them on Instagram,” he said. “There are ways of reporting now to can get information out, and I think that’s an extraordinary thing.”

Gibbs noted that some of Cooper’s most intimate reporting over an illustrious career has come from his recent podcast on grief. Having lost his father at age 10, and his brother to suicide when he was 21, Cooper was forced to deal with being the sole survivor of his family when his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, passed away at 95.  

“I found it to be such a lonely, sad experience and so difficult. And I came to this discovery that I had never actually grieved.” He created the podcast a few years ago to explore this feeling.

“I started talking to people about it. I started recording the conversations and people seemed to listen to the podcast,” he said. “I solicited voicemails at the end of the first season. I thought if there’s something people have learned in their grief and they want to call in and leave a message about it so that others would learn from, that might be beneficial. We got about a thousand calls the first time around. Ultimately now we’ve had 7,000.”  

And, he said, he listens to every one of them.

“I also realized that my entire career going to war zones was really motivated by my inability to allow myself to feel, and I wanted to go places where I wanted to understand how to survive from other people because I was fascinated by why my brother didn’t survive and yet I did, growing up in the same house. I was able to feel other people’s grief tangentially when I was overseas. And then I was able to leave and then continue to run from my own grief. So, for the first time in my life, at age 57, I kind of turned toward my own grief,” said Cooper.  

“I’ve learned I knew nothing about grief. I’ve experienced death, but I knew nothing about actually grieving, crying,” he said, moved to tears as he spoke.

“I’ve been running from it for 40 years, and it’s only now that I’m turning to it, I’ve learned extraordinary things. Stephen Colbert blew my mind when I first started this podcast. He talked about learning to love the thing you most wish had never happened. That concept was the beginning for me of trying to understand grief.”

Other prizes for the evening included a prize for investigative reporting and a new prize for explanatory reporting, both awarded by Gibbs, and book prizes awarded by Tom Patterson, ����vlog���� Bradlee Professor of Government and Press. The complete evening online.

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Photos by Martha Stewart