Christopher Keyes: You just got back from two weeks in Haiti after the earthquake. What's going through your head when you leave a place like that?
Anderson Cooper: It's really hard leaving. I stayed an additional week, and so did my team. You feel very privileged and frankly lucky and honored to be in a situation where you're working on a situation that is clearly important. It's life and death, its every real and it's happening all around you and around the clock. It feels like you're in the place you want to be and need to be and leaving the people you're been following or you've met… they can't leave, they're there and it's a strange thing to come back to you life and for me its been 2 and a half weeks of life changing momentous events, and you come back and you see your friends, and for them its been just another 2.5 weeks that have gone by and it's a strange adjustment that I've made before, but it's always uncomfortable. I've already started planning to go again in the next 2 or 3 weeks.

Your last Twitter posts were about seeing bodies being stacked up on access an road. I don't want to read into a 140-character tweet, but it sounded like a combo of exhaustion and exasperation. Is that fair?
Once they collected the bodies of people who died, we wanted to see what they were doing with them, so we tracked down what they were doing with the bodies, where their mass graves were dug. We went back to follow up on another story two weeks later, and I was stunned to find that some of the people were put into pits and buried over, but a lot of people were just dumped on the ground. I mean, literally dumped on the side of this road. I've seen a lot of really bad things and this was truly horrific. A bulldozer could have at least bulldozed these bodies into a pit and at least buried them. They went through the trouble of blocking the access roads so people couldn't see it, and it took a little work to be able to see it, and there's no reason for that.

I get the sense that, when covering these natural disasters, that at first there is no one to blame—it's not a human conflict or a war with two sides—but that over the course of the story, you begin to see things that you feel are being handled wrongly? How does that influence how you cover a story?
There's a learning curve for a lot governments and people on disasters like this and something like an earthquake is more unexpected than a hurricane is, and I think there's the shock and horror of it all, and when you see how things play out, it doesn't get better, and the local government is completely not meeting the needs of its people and frankly wasn't meeting the needs of it people before the earthquake so there's certainly a lot of things that anger people who are suffering through this, and those are the people we talk to all day long, and we let people know how people on the ground are feeling about it. It's not so much what I think about it, its more what I'm hearing form people. Why are people dying stupid deaths that don't need to occur; a child doesn't need to die from an infection from a broken leg.

Is part of your role there to broadcast that rage?
It's not so much that I'm broadcasting rage. I try not to take positions or allow the way I see something … I'm expressing people's frustration and giving voice to what you see. The reason I'm there is to bear witness to what's happening. There's really nothing sadder than a child dying and no one knowing that child's name and not knowing the suffering and pain of the loved ones left behind. And I think there's value in documenting that and giving voice to it and letting people around the world know that this person died and they didn't have to die, and this is the impact it's had on their family and this is the impact it'll have on the rest of their lives and tomorrow more people are going to die and tonight more people are going to die.

You have a studio that allows you to report regularly from the field. What defines a story that makes you want to jump on a plane and leave New York City immediately?
I personally tend to be drawn to stories that aren't paid much attention to, or stories that aren't on people's radar. The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one I've traveled to a lot both on my personal time and for CNN and 60 Minutes. There are six million people who have died in the Congo in the past 10 years. It's the deadliest conflict since WWII but very few people know much about it. When I was a kid I used to look at old maps with unexplored regions on them. I was always interested in central Africa and places that no longer exist or have changed names. But I was interested in sort of learning about the places on the map that were not really filled in. I find it interesting in this day and age that there are places that remain… not talked about. They don't make headlines. To me, six million people is extraordinary, it's horrific, and hundreds of thousands of women being gang raped, things which we become, people become immune to it, and we shouldn't become immune to it.

Why do people become immune to it?
There are some things which are so horrific that some people feel they can't do anything about it… that the natural, understandable response is to tune it out. If you feels there's not much you can do about it and it's truly horrific… a person being gang raped by a group of solders and then have a solder pulling the trigger and blowing them open, looking at that and dealing with the aftermath of that—these are things no one wants to have to think about. Yet, it happens to people, and I think it's important to bear witness to that, to shine a light on it, to learn who's doing that and what happens to survivors and show their strength and their courage.

We ran a piece recently by Nick Kristoff, about compassion psychology, and how he came to learn over time how to tell certain kinds of hopeful stories that had a better chance of motivating readers. Research has shown that people want a hopeful story, and that if you give them the bare facts of the tragedy, they are too liable to tune out. Does that influence the kind of stories you seek out when you go out to report? Beyond bearing witness, do you feel the need to tell a hopeful story?
I think it's sort of in the mix of stories you end up telling. I have the benefit of a two-hour program where we have the space to tell a variety of stories. Frankly I gravitate toward things which are – I believe in telling the reality of what's happening. And some nights there isn't much to be hopeful for. And it's hard to find that. I'm ok with that – you don't want to package things in a way that gives the wrong impression, ever, and I don't think nick does that at all. There are always hopeful things that you find. Even the first day after the quake, before the rescue crews got there, people rescued a little girl and that was a positive hopeful thing – she was dug out by her family, friends and neighbors. I do think it's an important thing to show that even in the midst of darkness there is light, and people do survive things that many of us think no one could possible survive. I think those stories should be told as well.

How do you deal with the psychological effects of what you're seeing through your reporting? Do you have to take time to deal with the emotions of it?
For me, it hasn't really been an issue, but I know plenty of people in this profession who do. It depends—if you're on a steady diet of doing this kind of story, war correspondents, they spend years covering it, that takes a toll. I think news organizations are opening up and learning how to deal with it. People need time or need to talk to somebody.There was a time when I first started when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years, that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing. It definitely takes a toll. After a time, I decided, look, I need to tell a variety of kind of stories and do stuff here in the US and not just overseas and focus on having a good life, not just an interesting professional life. So I do think you have to be very conscious of its effects and try to take a break when you need to, or whatever it may be.