CNN gets less stodgy, less newsy

Back in the day when he ran CNN, Ted Turner resorted to a motto to explain why the network avoided high-priced anchors and other showbiz trappings. “News,” Turner would say, “is the star.”

News may still be a star at CNN today, but I’m guessing it might be on the verge of throwing a tantrum about the reduced size of its dressing room. And who can blame news, with bigger stars like Angelina Jolie flitting around, sucking up all the attention with her tousled hair and beauteous bee-stung lips?

As a star-dazzled Anderson Cooper wrote Monday on his CNN blog, “To say I was impressed would be an understatement.”

In case CNN’s PR machine somehow missed your house, Jolie was the centerpiece -- and my stars, what an unspeakably gorgeous centerpiece she is! -- of Tuesday night’s two-hour “Anderson Cooper 360.” The promos for the show (which aired after Calendar’s deadline) promised a 360-degree view of Jolie’s thoughts on Africa’s humanitarian crises, although Darfur-news junkies should beware that 5 or 10 degrees or so might be devoted to her thoughts about her Namibian-born baby daughter, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt.

Based on the excerpts of the interview available on CNN’s website, Jolie will offer such penetrating insights into Africa’s crises as: Some of what’s happening there is awful. And this: We must do more.

Some -- not me, of course -- might accuse Cooper of doing a 180 on real news coverage with such a celebrity interview. Jolie’s bona fides as goodwill ambassador aside, is she really the most knowledgeable expert on Africa? You can say that celebrities help raise awareness of issues, but isn’t that the same thing we were told 20 years ago with “We Are the World”?

The Jolie interview does seem a watershed moment in the history of CNN, though, or maybe in the history of celebrity journalism. For years the network was derided as stodgy and out of it, as grandpa’s video wire service. The Anderson-Angelina meeting of minds does seem to whisper goodbye to all that. This is like ABC making Barbara Walters co-anchor in the 1970s, or CBS launching the yuppie newsmag “West 57th” -- a deliberate break with the past.

But Cooper doesn’t seem too concerned with that. He seems mostly angry about Internet haters who claim some sort of shadowy deal between his show and People magazine’s purchase of Shiloh baby photos. “CNN did not pay anything -- directly or indirectly -- to get Angelina Jolie to sit down for an interview,” he wrote on his blog.

Is he protesting too much? Or upset about the wrong thing?

One thing’s clear. After the interview runs, Jolie will still be big. It’s the news networks that got small.