TVSquad

Back in December, I thought that CNN's new news flipper, which replaced the continuous news crawl at the bottom of the screen with a black and white text that "flips" to give us a new story, would be a great change for the network.

Now I'm not that sure.

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.

Oh, I was afraid of this, and CNN made it official today: Rick Sanchez is going to replace Carol Lin as the weekend night anchor.

Rick "I Never Met a Tragic Situation I Didn't Want To Exploit" Sanchez has been showing up more and more on the network, as either a fill-in host or as a correspondent. He's the one who went out in the snow to try to "recreate" what happened to James Kim and his family. He's also the guy who got himself shot with a police taser gun, to the delight of people who don't like him (and fans of wacky videos in general). Not a big fan of his voice either. Grates on me like Rita Cosby's does.

Lin is leaving CNN after many years there, and she's having an interesting back and forth e-mail battle with Variety reporters over at TV Newser.