Gail Shister: "CNN's Anderson Cooper...used to make fun of flagpole-fliers.

'I thought, 'Why don't they just go indoors?' It's common sense.'

Once Cooper began covering hurricanes, however, he did a 180. 'I believe in being on the front lines of stories, whether it's Baghdad or Niger or hurricanes. There's a value to bearing witness to what hundreds of thousands of people are going through. I see nothing wrong with a reporter going through it with them. I've never pretended to grab onto something. The audience knows when something's real and when it's not.'"