CNN's Cooper Got Start Covering Wars

Springdale Morning News - Springdale, AR, USA - Anderson Cooper never wanted to be a news anchor.

"It's not anything I ever actually set out to become. It's actually something I used to make fun of," Cooper said. "I grew up watching Guy Smiley on Sesame Street and Kent Brockman on the Simpsons. That was sort of my idea of what an anchor was."

The host of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" didn't know what he wanted to do after graduating from Yale, but a high school trip through Africa had shown him the world outside the United States.

"I had a liberal arts degree, which means I had no actual skill," Cooper told a University of Arkansas office. "My plan was actually I'd start going to wars because there were fewer people there to compete against."

So he borrowed a video camera and got on an airplane.

"I had a friend of mine make a fake press pass for me on a Macintosh computer," he said.

More than 50 countries and countless conflicts later, he's still trying to stay away from the news desk. Propelled by that thought, he's been in Iraq and Afghanistan, covered hurricanes Katrina and Rita, chased the Washington, D.C., sniper attacks and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia over Texas.

"I may have gone to Yale, but in my mind, I was educated in the streets of Mogadishu, Sarajevo, South Africa and Rwanda," he said.