Aaron Brown Talks About… Himself

By Brian 

Part four of four

“Aaron Brown, the most trusted name in home loans?”

The former CNN anchor, describing job offers in a recent interview with TVNewser, called the idea “wacky.”

“I’ve have a bunch of conversations with people about possible jobs,” he said, and mortgage company spokesperson was just one of the not-so-serious options.

Nearly two years after NewsNight ended and two weeks after his CNN contract expired, Brown is most interested in a more personal form of broadcasting.

He had lunch in Arizona with a woman who produces pilots for public radio programs, and he “came away very interested.”

Compared to his time at CNN, he’d have a relatively low profile. And that’s okay.

“I don’t want to be a big deal,” Brown said. “I’ve had my run with celebrity and I’m not comfortable with it.”

Brown won’t say as much, but in the eyes of many Americans, he’ll always be the 9/11 anchor — the man who stood atop CNN’s Midtown Manhattan rooftop as the towers fell and narrated the aftermath for a worldwide audience.

“It blows me away how often in my life, in the craziest of circumstances, people come up to me still and talk about that day and talk about the work we as an organization did that day and that I represented that day, and say thank you.

In a weird way, nothing else matters to me,” he said.

In 2001, Brown and Paula Zahn were being positioned as the new faces of CNN. Now Anderson Cooper anchors Brown’s former time slot, and Zahn only has a few weeks left at 8pm. Some of the changes can be traced to CNN’s management shuffles.

“One thing that was always difficult for me there, honestly, [was that] the the people who were invested in me, the people who hired me, some of them weren’t there by the time I got to work” in July 2001.

Jon Klein became president of CNN in November 2004, twelve months before he replaced Brown with Cooper.

“In every business, it helps to have a rabbi, to have someone invested in you, who believes in what you do. That wasn’t Jon, and that wasn’t Jim — Jim was certainly no fan — and that made it difficult.”

Brown described Klein as “smart” with “a lot of energy” and “strong opinions.”

“I like Jon, but I never felt he had invested in me from the beginning,” he said.

Brown said Klein believed NewsNight “needed to be broader and a little more trendy… I think he probably correctly saw me as a reasonably talented guy who was a little bit old school.”

Now Brown may channel that talent into a public radio show or a book, or maybe something totally different.

When he says “I’m content with how viewers see me,” he sounds sincere. In this era of television news, maybe there’s no better feeling to have.

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