Each year, the Shorenstein Center presents the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism to recognize outstanding contributions to the field and honor work that has enriched our political discourse and our society. This year’s winner is Anderson Cooper, award-winning CNN anchor and CBS 60 Minutes correspondent.
“Year after year, Anderson Cooper has navigated the toughest stories and kept viewers informed while providing incisive analysis of the day’s events,” said Shorenstein Director Nancy Gibbs. “Whether at the anchor desk or in the field, Anderson is an intrepid journalist and a natural storyteller capable of grilling a public official one minute and comforting a displaced refugee the next.”
Cooper will be the featured speaker at this year’s Goldsmith Awards ceremony, to be held on April 3, 2025 in the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The in-person event will be livestreamed at GoldsmithAwards.org and ShorensteinCenter.org.
2025 Goldsmith Career Award Winner Anderson Cooper:
Anderson 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 is a regular correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes.
Since the start of his career in 1992, Cooper has worked in nearly eighty countries and covered major news events around the world, often reporting from the scene. Cooper has also played a pivotal role in CNN’s political and election coverage. He has anchored from conventions and moderated several presidential primary debates and town halls. In 2016, Cooper was selected by the Committee On Presidential Debates to co-moderate one of the three debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
At CNN and 60 Minutes, Cooper has won a number of major journalism awards. He helped lead CNN’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina and duPont Award-winning coverage of the 2004 tsunami. Additionally, he has been awarded twenty-three Emmy Awards, including two for his coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. All four of Cooper’s books have topped the New York Times Best-seller List, including his most recent, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune.
Before joining CNN, Cooper was an ABC News correspondent and host of the network’s reality program The Mole. Cooper anchored ABC’s overnight newscast World News Now, and was a correspondent for World News Tonight as well as 20/20. Cooper joined ABC from Channel One News, where he served as chief international correspondent. During that time, he reported and produced stories, from conflicts in Bosnia, Cambodia, Haiti, Israel, Myanmar, Russia, Rwanda, Somalia, and South Africa. Cooper graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. He also studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.
The Goldsmith Awards, founded in 1991 and funded by a gift from the Greenfield Foundation, strives to foster a more insightful and spirited public debate about government, politics and the press, and to demonstrate the essential role of a free press in a thriving democracy. The Goldsmith Awards ceremony on April 3, 2025 will feature a keynote by the Career Award winner, as well as the presentation of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting, and two Goldsmith Book Prizes.
