As Geraldo Rivera negotiated his way through sidewalk construction on State Street, people waved and yelled his name. When he later walked into a room filled with alleged gang members, they eagerly grabbed his hands, obviously and utterly starstruck.
More Top Picks Best Migraine Glasses For Computer Use
Everywhere he went while originating his day-and nighttime TV talk shows in Chicago last week, Rivera was greeted with enthusiasm and warmth.
No one thought to bring up the two incidents that have blemished Rivera’s career for several years.
So he decided to mention them himself.
“What do you think of when you think of Geraldo?” Rivera asked. “The chair and Al Capone.”
That’s chair, as in the chair that broke his nose in 1988 after his show went up for grabs in a melee between white supremacists and a black activist leader.
And that’s Al Capone, as in Al Capone’s vault, the opening of which–during two hours live on national TV in 1986–Rivera promised would yield amazing items, but gave up only a few dusty liquor bottles and caused waves of derision and critical potshots.
Enough is enough, Rivera says. It’s time for the country in general, and his colleagues in the media in particular, to get over it.
Especially that fight, which critics of daytime gab festivals point to as one of the defining moments of a genre that is eroding the country’s morals by providing a steady diet of hopelessness, despair, debauchery and just plain low class.
“It happened in November, (around the time that) George Bush was elected president,” the 53-year-old Rivera was saying while preparing for the broadcast of “Rivera Live” from the studios of CNBC’s Chicago bureau in the Chicago Board of Trade.
“It happened 1,600 episodes ago. That’s 200 original episodes a year times eight. Sixteen hundred episodes ago! That’s a lifetime ago in television.
“It’s just that it gets played over and over again” on television news shows and specials, whenever an example of the evils of daytime talk is needed, he explained. “And so it’s a living memory and people forget that it happened in 1988.”
As bad as talk TV might have been then, things have been much worse in the last few years, and Rivera thinks one reason is increased competition for ratings.
“It wasn’t until the huge proliferation of talk shows that it really got very bad,” he offered, “when people, following that traditional American reaction to competition, tried to lowball the other guy. `All right, you do hookers, I’ll do teen hookers.’ `You do teen hookers, I’ll do teen hookers and their mother hookers.’ And then it got mean, which is when I really bailed out. `Watch Janey tell her parents from the suburbs that she’s a hooker.’ “
Becoming socially responsible
Rivera officially began to take a higher road at the beginning of this year. That was when he put into action what he calls his “10-point bill of rights and responsibilities for talk shows.”
“Essentially what it did was put in writing what had previously been oft-promised by people in my business,” Rivera explained. “To make the program socially responsible, not get into thrill for the sake of exploitation, or sensationalism.”
Rivera freely admits his show had been wallowing in the mud along with many others. “There is plenty that I did in my past incarnation that I look back on now with embarrassment. Some bemusement, some nostalgia, but a lot of embarrassment.”
One show in particular made him redefine his mission. It was an episode in April 1995 titled “Terrible Family Secrets.” Among those spilling the beans was a young woman who had been abused by her “arrogant punk of a husband,” remembered Rivera.
“She finally had the courage to leave him. In any case, one of their two children wasn’t his. (When he heard that) he slammed the wall and stormed off. And said `Thanks, Geraldo’ on his way out. We never aired that program, but it really was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just said I’ve had it, I’m getting out of here.
“Basically I felt as if I had hit a new low,” he continued. “Much worse than Al Capone’s vault. I felt unclean.”
And now?
Rivera is doing shows like one in Chicago where he interviewed a crack-addicted woman in her mid-30s, with a 22-year-old son in prison for a gang-related shooting, an 18-year-old daughter with a year-old baby, and a 14-year-old son who is leaning toward joining a gang.
“I said to the grandmother, `If you’ll allow us to put you in detox, and you complete the program successfully, then I guarantee you we’ll find you a nice place to live.’
“So we’re not just doing a story about the problem, we’re going to show, at least in that case, that we are intervening in a very positive way.”
He’d rather do such shows than what he did before: “To be competitive, if I have to go back to `Transsexual Nuns and the Midgets Who Love Them,’ I’m just not interested.”
He wants stories and shows with substance, and later that night he taped for later broadcast a gathering of 30 young men at the Inner City Youth Foundation on the city’s South Side. These men belonged to one of two “organizations,” as Rivera referred to them, and had put aside their differences to openly talk about their lives on the streets.
“I like that you’re together,” Rivera told them. “What I want to know is why? Why did you put all that aside and come together tonight?”
From lawyer to journalist
This new seriousness in his daily talk show has been ever apparent in his evening show. Rivera believes “Rivera Live,” which airs nightly on CNBC at 8 p.m. (“The Geraldo Rivera Show,” produced by Tribune Entertainment, is on weekdays at 11 a.m. on Tribune Co. owned WGN-Ch. 9), has helped re-establish his journalistic credentials.
“But to be taken seriously, I’m almost like ice cream. I’m like a guilty pleasure,” Rivera said.
Rivera’s show started on CNBC in February 1994.
“I wanted to be a newsman,” he said. “That’s where I want to end my career. And I want to show people that the anchor guys at the network news programs aren’t smarter than I am, they’re not more experienced than I am, they haven’t had more life experiences, they haven’t had more experiences in the field than I have.”
They almost certainly didn’t get their starts the way Rivera did. His came 26 years ago in New York, working as an attorney for such activist groups as a Black Panther-like organization named the Young Lords. When the group, in protest, took over a Harlem building for three days, Rivera was their conduit to the media.
A news director for WABC, ABC’s New York affiliate, spotted him and was impressed by Rivera’s handling of the situation and thought he had potential as a TV reporter.
More Top Picks Best Flicker Free Monitors For Eye Comfort
“I didn’t know what reporters did,” Rivera said. “The only reporter I ever knew about was Jimmy Olsen in the Superman series.”
Rivera did know, however, that it was time “to get out” of what he was doing, because he didn’t believe he was having any impact. The WABC news director convinced the Manhattan native that as a journalist he could make a difference in people’s lives.
WABC enrolled Rivera in Columbia University’s journalism school (he already had a degree in foreign trade from the University of Arizona, and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School) for six weeks of study. He parlayed that cram course into three years at the affiliate, and later, tenures at ABC’s “20/20” and “Good Morning America,” winning 10 Emmys along the way.
Life after 20/20
Rivera was fired from “20/20” in 1985 by ABC News chief Roone Arledge. Rivera said it was because of a story establishing a relationship between the late Marilyn Monroe to the Kennedy brothers John and Robert (Rivera insisted it was because Arledge was friendly with Ethel Kennedy, Robert’s widow). He spent months looking for steady work (CNN offered him a job at a fraction of his ABC salary) until forging a pact to host the Capone special for Tribune Entertainment in April 1986. At the time, it was the highest-rated syndicated special in history.
`A buster of hypocrites’
With CNBC and the daytime show, Rivera is looking to move “back to my roots” with more thought-provoking, opinionated programs.
“I’m becoming much more political. That’s the next phase,” he said on the ride back to his hotel from what he saw as a successful taping with the gang members.
“(The shows) will be more pointed,” he continued. “I don’t want it to be lecturey, but it will be very substantive, in some ways opinionated. It will be a buster of hypocrites.”
One part of Rivera’s reporting that will never be opinionated is his coverage of the O.J. Simpson saga. He declared “Rivera Live” the program of record for the case, a reason he does so many shows on the subject. (Former Simpson-trial lawyers Christopher Darden and Alan Dershowitz are twice weekly regulars on the show).
“I’m trapped in the nighttime” he said of his Simpson shows, which were an offshoot of a program he did on athletes who had been abusive to their spouses.
“I’ve declared (the show) the show of record, and now I’m off. On black talk radio, the rap against me is that I’m, quote-unquote, obsessed with the O.J. case,” he said. “But they never said that about Ted Koppel.” Rivera claimed Koppel did at least 60 shows on the Simpson case on “Nightline.” He added, “They never say it about (CNN’s) `Burden of Proof’ with Greta Van Susteren and Roger Cossack.”
One has to wonder whether Rivera, who describes himself as a reporter, commentator or talk show host, depending on the topic of conversation, has an opinion on whether Simpson murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
Before getting out of his car to rest briefly at his hotel, he laughed ruefully when asked, “So, did O.J. do it?”
Rivera, who has talked with dozens of people who have or plan to make money from the so-called Trial of the Century, stopped laughing and said, “I’ll tell you one thing–I’ll never write a book on any of it.”
THE `NEW’ GERALDO RIVERA
Geraldo Rivera claims to have cleaned up his daytime talk show, moving from seamy topics to relevant. He’s bold about it too, saying, “This season I’d venture to say there’s no one doing less exploitative stuff than we are on the air.”
Here are some of the show’s topics over the last month; each Friday “The Geraldo Rivera Show” lightens up with a show devoted to celebrity news.
You be the judge, but remember show titles can often be more outlandish than the subjects themselves.
“A Parent’s Plea: Please Bring My Child Home,” Oct. 24
“Susan McDougal: The Whitewater Scandal That Put Her Behind Bars,” Sept. 30
“CIA & Drugs in the Hood,” Oct. 21
“Black & Blue: Cops that Cross the Line,” Oct. 14
“Video Victims: Are You Being Watched?” Oct. 1
“Toxic Fame: Celebrities Reveal the Roller Coaster Ride of Stardom,” Oct. 16
“Parents Who Spy on Their Teens,” Oct. 7
“Rage & Revenge: When Your Lover Takes It Out on the Kids,” Oct. 22
“Beautiful People Talk Beauty,” Oct. 9