http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/07/07/independence-day-for-aaro_n_54962.htmlCNN anchor Aaron Brown was unceremoniously relieved of his anchor duties in November 2005, replaced with Anderson Cooper in a sudden push — but he remained under contract to CNN, legally enjoined from taking a job with a competing network and precluded from speaking with the media. That contract, which began in September 2001 — shortly before Brown was rushed to his first night of air on September 11th — finally expired on July 1st, leaving Brown free to do and say whatever he wishes.
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And he has no need to go back. "I did it the way I wanted to do it," he says of his program, "NewsNight with Aaron Brown," which ran from September 11, 2001 to November 7, 2005. Brown's last show was on October 28, 2006 — after an awkward month-long co-anchoring stint with Anderson Cooper following the latter's star turn during Katrina — and before Brown left for vacation, from which he did not know if he would return. As it turned out, he didn't.
"I was very uncomfortable at the end with where they wanted it to go," says Brown. "I didn't think the viewers were behind me when we did dumb television," he says, referring to the souped-up version of "NewsNight" that emerged with Cooper's arrival, with what SF Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman called "all kinds of cute and unnecessary elements" added to NewsNight, "significantly reducing the accuracy of the show's title." Ouch. Says Brown, who imagined the audience thinking "he's hating it": "They were right — I was hating it." (Goodman, however, wrote that Brown had behaved "about as professionally as anyone could expect.")
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Brown is also equally emphatic about something else he won't do: Opinion. "I think I'm kind of an old-time news guy," he says. "I didn't want to do opinion shows. One of the problems for me these days is we don't seem to be able to agree on the facts. Life is not talk radio — I just like the wall between A and B to be a little clearer, and I am uncomfortable when the wall doesn't seem to exist."
For his part, Brown says he's more interested in Iraq than Paris Hilton (yet another area in which he breaks with CNN!). "I'm a child of another war, Vietnam," says Brown — and that's where he sees a disconnect between himself and his students. "I tell them, 'It's sinful how little you know,'" says Brown. "'There's kids your age dying. Unlike when I was a kid, there's no draft and they don't have to pay attention."
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