TVSquad

A while back I called Anderson Cooper "The Four Million Dollar Man." Looks like we're going to have to call him something else.

CNN has just given the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360 a big increase in pay. Cooper will be paid $50 million over the next five years. Yes, that's 5-0. That comes out to be $10 million a year, but it's up to you whether you want to call Coop "The 50 Million Dollar Man" or "The 10 Million Dollar Man."

So readers, is he worth it? It's really hard to judge whether one person is "worth" the amount of money they are given, whether it's Michael Jordan, Julia Roberts, or Anderson Cooper. But Cooper does indeed seem to be the future of CNN, the "face" of the network, if you will, and it looks like they want to lock him in for a long time to come.

Cooper hosts his nightly show at 10pm and also contributes to 60 Minutes over on CBS.

I haven't seen Rita Cosby on MSNBC in several weeks. Not that I've really noticed, because I try to avoid her whenever possible. It's the voice. Yeah, sorry, no offense, but I just can't stand listening to her raspy voice. But now the NY Post is reporting that, after a three week vacation, the rasp is gone!

Supposedly, the three week break was an "enforced" vacation, and besides the rest that she got, Cosby won't go into details on what she did to change her voice. I'm assuming she didn't go through puberty, like that episode of The Brady Bunch where Peter's voice changed.

Can any TV Squad readers confirm this? I'm going to check MSNBC to see if she's on today.

[via TV Newser]

This seems like something that probably should have been done a while ago, but rumors have been in the air about MSNBC not renewing its lease in Secaucus, NJ and moving the entire operation to Manhattan. Makes sense, since NYC is the media capital and NBC is already housed at 30 Rock. Hey, maybe they can move there and rename the network 30 Rock? Oh, wait a minute...

I still think they should get rid of the MS part and just call it the NBC News Channel. Is Microsoft even a major player in the channel anymore, aside from having two letters in the name? They've already named Dan Abrams the new head and changed the graphics and thinking of moving to NYC, so why not go all the way and change the name too?