“Is Anderson The Only Star CNN Has?”

“It will take a crowbar to pry CNN’s Anderson Cooper out of the Middle East,” Gail Shister wrote in a column for today’s Inquirer.

But by the time readers picked up the paper, Cooper was already leaving the region. “He was driving down from Israel’s northern border toward Tel Aviv to start a long weekend break” when news of the plane terror plot broke, EP David Doss says.

Cooper boarded a charter plane to the U.K. this morning, and he’ll anchor 360 from London tonight. This all leads an insider to ask: “Is Anderson Cooper the only star CNN has? It seems to be a one-man show at the network. This morning you couldn’t pry Cooper out of the Mideast but now that the top breaking story happens to be out of London, their one star was plucked and parachuted into the next location. What about Wolf Blitzer, Heidi Collins, John Roberts, Paula Zahn, Soledad O’Brien or Miles O’Brien? No wonder why they’re still a second-rate network…relying on one anchor must be tough.”

> Update: Christiane Amanpour is on the way to London as well, and she’s obviously a star too…