Geraldo Rivera
Geraldo Rivera was born
4 July 1943 in New York, New York.
His mother, whose maiden name is Lilly Friedman, is Jewish, and his late father,
Cruz Rivera, was full-blooded Puerto Rican.
graduated from Brooklyn Law School. He obtained a summer internship with the
Manhattan District Attorney's office, working underneath the city's legendary
mob-buster Frank Hogan. For a year he turned out to be a Reginald Heber Smith
Fellowship in Poverty Law administered by the University of Pennsylvania and
funded by the federal government.
During the fall of 1969, He began hearing about a Puerto Rican activist group
called the Young Lords. He ended up throwing his lot with this group,
representing them in court, primarily for criminal trespass and loitering
charges, and marching shoulder-to-shoulder with them in demonstrations. He also
acted as a public spokesman, regularly appearing on New York television.
He joined WABC, One of the stories that he did at the station, probably the best
his worked on in his life, involved a place known as Willowbrook, a state school
located on Staten Island. He later joined ABC's Good Morning America and then
the network's World News Tonight staff. The dynamic Rooney Arledge, who became
president of ABC News in 1977, made much of this possible. Arledge wanted to
start a newsmagazine to give CBS News' venerable "60 Minutes" a run for its
money. He picked Geraldo as one of the correspondents for the new show, which
became known as "20/20". Until Fox News hired me, "20/20" was the most exciting,
challenging job he ever had, Geraldo says.
"Rivera churned out hard-hitting stories on such topics as Agent Orange and drug
company rip-offs, letting nothing stand in his way." Elvis Presley was a hero of
Rivera's. He spent months interviewing witnesses and obtaining documents that
detailed Presley's long history of drug use-so much of it new exclusive material
that they took over the entire hour-long season premiere of "20/20." On the air.
Rivera delivered an eye-opening account of Presley's demise and blew apart the
cover-up that followed his death. It was the perfect "20/20" story, applying the
techniques of investigative reporting to a red-hot, sensational topic to produce
huge ratings, then and now. "The Elvis Cover-Up," which ran on September 13,
1979, became the most-watched program of the year.
In early 1983 producer Joe Lovett convinced Geraldo that AIDS was a major health
problem. "The AIDS story was Rivera at his best-using his influence on behalf of
the underdog, harnessing his energy to produce compelling television...He stayed
with the AIDS story for years...while others ignored the disease."
Rivera also tackled subjects too big to be covered in a fifteen-minute segment.
He did an hour on the manufacture and trafficking of heroin and another on the
politics of cancer reform. With producer Charlie Thompson and Don Thrasher,
Rivera delivered hard-hitting investigations into defense contracting and
Pentagon waste. (Av) Westin (the show executive producer), who collected toy
soldiers as a hobby, loved military stories, as did Arledge, and "20/20" helped
make such symbols as the $642 toilet seat famous.
Then his professional world came crashing down around his shoulders during the
fall of 1985 when he came to the defense of colleagues who had assembled a
well-documented account about the death of Marilyn Monroe and her romantic ties
with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
The show also contained alleged threats by members of organized crime to
blackmail the Kennedy bothers for their indiscretions with the movie idol.
Arledge, who was a close friend of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel, killed the
segment, even though Bob Siegenthaler, ABC News' vice president for standards
and practices, ruled the story met ABC's standards for fairness and accuracy.
With no support, he committed professional suicide by calling syndicated
columnist and unloading. By questioning Roon
e
Arledge's journalistic integrity, he burned the already rickety bridge
connecting him with his onetime friend and longtime employer. With no contract,
he mistakenly thought he would be quickly picked up by another network or one of
the flourishing cable operations. But that was not to be. No management is
comfortable with a "whistle-blower." So for the next six years, it was
catch-as-catch-can, complete with "skinheads," Al Capone's vault and endless
talk shows Geraldo would rather forget.
1994, when CNBC program "Rivera Live" rescued him from the tabloid ranks.
Finally, he landed his late-in-life dream journalistic assignment with Fox
Network as a war correspondent.
He was covering the war in Afghanistan, coming under fire and feeling there was
meaning to Geraldo's life again. Then another shoe dropped. The Baltimore Sun
wrote and widely distributed a series of stories alleging essentially that
Geraldo lied about being at the scene of a "friendly fire" incident in
Afghanistan. The Sun doesn't expressly say in its stories that Rivera lied.
Instead, the paper ridicules his explanation that he made an honest mistake,
confusing an incident Geraldo witnessed in Tora Bora, for another in far-off
Kandahar. The effect of The Sun's story created a firestorm against Rivera. The
story metastasized on radio and television talk shows, some featuring The Sun's
writer of the story, David Folkenflik and on Saturday Night Live. The
newspaper's innuendo became a generally accepted fact: Geraldo Rivera had been
caught in a lie. For the past six months Geraldo have been in communication with
The Sun, attempting essentially to prove with videotapes of the grisly accident
his innocence of their false implications.
By the end of this fruitless process, Geraldo managed to extract a grudging
private statement from the editor, saying that though he had made a "major"
mistake in his reporting, he did not believe Geraldo intentionally deceived his
viewers, and that Rivera showed grit and courage getting to the frontlines at
Tora Bora. But he declined to say that publicly, neither retracting nor even
modifying his stories in print.
In 2001, Rivera Jumps from CNBC to Fox News Channel.
Rivera has received more than 170
awards for journalism, including the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award,
three national and seven local Emmys, two Columbia-Duponts and two additional
Scripps Howard Journalism Awards.
His vast war experience has
spanned from the violent coup in Chile and the Yom Kippur War to the civil wars
in Guatemala, the Philippines and Nicaragua, as well as the ethnic conflicts in
Lebanon (1980-83) and Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo (1998-1999). In 2000, he went
to Colombia to cover the country's civil war.
Journalist
Biography
New York's WABC-TV (1970–75), reporter
Good Night America and then Good Morning America (1973–76). Host and
correspondent
20/20 (1978–85)** Correspondent
The Geraldo show/The Geraldo Rivera Show (1987-2001) Host
CNBC on Rivera Live (1994-2001) Host
Fox New Channel (2001-?) War correspondent
The Pulse (2003- ) Correspondent
**his report on Elvis Presley's drug use is the
highest-rated in 20/20's history.** His syndicated special on breaking into Al
Capone's vault became TV's highest-rated special ever.
LINKS:
Geraldo Speaks @ roughpoint.tv
roughpoint.tv Video Evidence
Techtv Video Interview Techtv video interview
www.wvah.com The Pulse
Click to see more
last updated:Monday August 29, 2005
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