3 takeaways from Anderson Cooper leaving '60 Minutes'

Anderson Cooper announced late Monday that he will step down as a "60 Minutes" contributor after a 20-year run there, but will continue to anchor his long-running 8 p.m. program, "Anderson Cooper 360," on CNN. What does this "60 Minutes" departure mean? Here are three takeaways:

This looks bad for "60 Minutes"

Because optics count for so much on television — everything really (TV is a visual medium, you've noticed) — this does look bad for "60." Cooper joined 20 years ago, on the cusp of a youth movement, just months after Mike Wallace (87 at the time) announced his retirement from the classic he helped launch, and months before Katie Couric joined as "Evening News" anchor. Thirty-eight at the time, Cooper was on a hot streak — a new memoir had come out, while he had reported (emotionally, exhaustively) from Hurricane Katrina just a year earlier. Moreover, there were no Presidents to publicly harangue CNN news anchors (in those days, Presidents mostly stewed in private). A swashbuckling star full of energy and smarts, Cooper was the face of the new "60" — the face of the future itself. He would remain on  "Anderson Cooper 360," so CNN got something in the bargain too (prestige, for one thing, and simulcasts of his "60" pieces for another). Now that's all gone.

This "60 Minutes" Cooper run has been a success, and has yielded some memorable pieces — that one he did last year, for example, on the bedrooms of high school shooting victims. He even got a Grammy nod for a story on the musician inmates in a prison in the African country of Malawi. Cooper isn't on the show all that often (he's been contracted for about six stories a year), but he makes it count when he is. Goodbye to all that.

This looks bad for CBS

Back to those optics. Could this not have happened at a worse time — proud CBS News, in the thrall of a new boss, Bari Weiss, who is (according to many critics inside and out) determined to align this network more with the interests of the POTUS than the viewing public? That criticism may be unfair, perhaps, or not entirely fair, but those optics do suggest otherwise. She has clashed with "60 Minutes"; pulled a story on El Salvador's CECOT (the vast holding pen for deportees from the U.S.), which later aired with nominal changes; and is on the verge of initiating layoffs at the news division. There may have been worse starts for a president (or overseer) of CBS News — or any major news division, for that matter — but it's hard to think of a singularly more awful start than this one.

There were even reports that Weiss, who launched the anti-woke news site, The Free Press, had approached Cooper about taking over as anchor of "Evening News." If true, not only did he reject that overture, but is now leaving the network altogether. Optics, optics ...

What does Anderson Cooper want?

In his statement late yesterday, Cooper said (in part) that "For nearly twenty years, I’ve been able to balance my jobs at CNN and CBS, but I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they want to spend time with me." (His oldest, Wyatt, is about to turn six, while his other son, Sebastian, turned four a week ago.) Plausible and possibly even true, but surely there were other options besides severing an arrangement that has worked so well for both parties going back 20 years? "60 Minutes" is an intensive job, and does require a degree of commitment that is, under normal circumstances, not advisable for part-timers. But why not cut back on pieces, or adjust them to fit with this professed father-centric schedule? Meredith Vieira — once a full-timer at "60" — did just that years ago on this broadcast.

Long removed from those days as CNN anchor hotshot, Cooper is now a not-quite elder news statesman, who has earned respect and viewer esteem. Seven hundred thousand of them still regularly tune in to "360" — not a Fox News number, but certainly healthy by CNN standards. And despite a kindergarten taunt now and then from the POTUS — who took to calling him "Allison" Cooper during the last campaign — he's even managed to largely stay away from that particular blowtorch. What does Cooper want? Clearly nothing to do with CBS News. What must that message convey to everyone else at "60" who doesn't have another day job to fall back on?