The staggeringly huge salary of CNN’s Anderson Cooper is coming under a harsh spotlight as the ratings-challenged cable news network is expected to undergo drastic cost-cutting measures once it is cleaved from Warner Bros. Discovery. 

WBD announced earlier this month that it will spin off its struggling cable businesses from its rapidly growing streaming services. The man tapped to lead the cable business is the current chief financial officer of WBD, Gunnar Wiedenfels, who is known as a ruthless cost-cutter. Entertainment journalists and industry insiders expect that Mr. Wiedenfels will look to drastically cut costs at CNN, as its ratings have plummeted but it continues to spend vast sums on its staff, including million- and multimillion-dollar salaries for some of its on-camera talent.

As the network is expected to shrink its footprint, it is presumed that there will be layoffs and salary cuts. Amid dire predictions for CNN, there was consternation and shock over a report in Puck by a well-sourced former CNN staffer, Dylan Byers, that Mr. Cooper earns an eye-popping $18 million a year, while his show routinely fails to crack a million viewers a night. 

Such a large salary is not entirely unheard of in the television news industry. However, the hosts who are paid that much typically draw in much larger audiences, and are the largest audience drivers at their networks. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is reported to earn $25 million a year, though she only works one day a week. However, on her one day of work, she has been a major ratings draw for the network. On June 16, she drew in 2.065 million viewers. MSNBC executives have described her to media columnists as “ratings Viagra,” and her work is directly tied to higher ratings and significantly greater revenue. Yet even Ms. Maddow’s pay has come under intense scrutiny due to her one day a week work schedule.

Five years ago, Mr. Cooper was routinely garnering a much larger audience than he does today. In 2020, his show averaged 1.89 million total viewers with 498,000 in the key demo. And in the 2010s, he was arguably the face of CNN, reporting with empathy from disaster zones like earthquake-ravaged Haiti while wearing tight black T-shirts — a style that would come to be emulated by other TV news personalities.

During the first Trump term, Mr. Cooper emerged as a patrician, liberal warrior, and fierce opponent of President Trump, riding the “Trump bump” that elevated CNN’s ratings and revenue.

Now, however, with Mr. Trump back in power and not much of a  rump bump, Mr. Cooper is barely competing, outperformed and sometimes surpassed by the lesser-known host of the 10 p.m. roundtable show, Abby Phillip.

In the first half of last week, Mr. Cooper averaged 843,000 total viewers, with 190,000 in the coveted 25- to 54-year-old demo. During the same time period, Ms. Phillip averaged 734,000 total viewers. Her audience in the demo averaged 182,000. She is believed to earn a small fraction of Mr. Cooper’s outsized compensation.

But Mr. Cooper’s compensation has not declined with his ratings.

During a podcast appearance with a laid-off CNN journalist, Alisyn Camerota, Puck’s Dylan Byers noted that with TV multi-year news contracts, salaries can sometimes become “baked in over time” and suggested that Mr. Cooper’s salary is a relic from previous years when the network’s ratings were much higher.

Puck reported that Mr. Cooper’s salary is nearly five times higher than that of the chief White House correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, who anchors the 9 p.m. show. It is also much higher than that of another star of the network, Jake Tapper, 56, whose profile at CNN and in the zeitgeist is currently far higher than that of Mr. Cooper, 58. Puck reports Mr. Tapper is in a “low-eight-figure multi-year deal.” Network insiders have told other media columnists that Mr. Tapper actually makes $7.5 million.

There is speculation that the famously aggressive Mr. Tapper, who has recently faced harsh criticism for a book he co-wrote about President Biden’s cognitive and physical decline, is furious that his salary is lower than that of Mr. Cooper despite Mr. Cooper’s diminished stature. 

Mr. Wiedenfels is believed to be looking to squeeze as much value out of CNN before the cable business collapses. On top of potential layoffs or even shrinking its global profile and international bureaus, which for years helped make it one of the go-to stations for breaking news, executives are expected to closely scrutinize Mr. Cooper’s salary.

Mr. Byers, writing about how the breakup of WBD could affect CNN, said, “Gunnar will look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost.”

“This will have perceptible ramifications on the talent side. Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary?” he asked.

Amid the speculation about the future of CNN, multiple reports said that Mr. Cooper fired his talent agent, Jay Sures, at the United Talent Agency and hired Creative Artists Agency, where he will be represented by a Hollywood “super agent,” Bryan Lourd.

Creative Artists Agency did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Mr. Cooper’s decision to switch talent agents seems to signal that he is preparing for a tough negotiation over his salary. 

Interestingly, Mr. Tapper is represented by Mr. Sures, which raises questions about why the talent agent lost his much higher-paid client. Typically, when two competing talents within the same network are represented by the same agent, the lesser talent signs with a different agent ahead of a contract renegotiation.

According to Variety, Mr. Cooper’s decision to ditch his former agent is seen as a sign that he may be preparing to leave the network — where he has worked since 2001 — or at least explore his options to get ahead of what media insiders predict will be the outlet’s decline into obscurity. 

Mr. Cooper, years ago, hosted a reality show on ABC called “The Mole” and also hosted a failed daytime talk show, produced by a predecessor of WBD, for less than two years.

Mr. Byers has predicted that CNN will not entirely disappear, but will see its audience and operations shrink until it lives on as a husk of its former self. 

During his appearance on “Sanity,” Mr. Byers specifically addressed Mr. Cooper’s future — who he said was once a household name before the network’s ratings collapsed — and speculated that the highly paid host may be getting “exhausted” by seeing his audience shrink and decide to leave the network in search of other opportunities, while holding onto his side job as a correspondent for CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”

Besides his enormous salary at CNN, Mr. Cooper belongs to one of America’s most famous and richest families, the Vanderbilts, and is the son of the late Vanderbilt heiress, Gloria Vanderbilt, the great-great-granddaughter of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Mr. Cooper co-wrote a memoir with his mother, which was published in 2016. He has amassed a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio, with several homes stretching from Manhattan to a coastal village in Brazil.