When Geraldo Rivera started showing up in Afghanistan's mountains assuming the role of chief US war cheerleader for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, the face of frontline reporting changed forever, writes Oliver Burkeman
You might remember Geraldo Rivera. You might remember the time he broke his nose in a vicious televised brawl with a neo-Nazi on his talkshow, or the time he had fat from his buttocks injected into his forehead, live on air. Or when he became the first person to prise open Al Capone's secret vault, revealing - well, dust, mainly, but it didn't matter: the broadcast still holds the record for the highest ratings for a one-off show on American television.
Then again, perhaps you had better things to do in the mid-1990s than watch the daytime schedules where his shows were screened in Ireland, alongside Oprah and Jerry Springer and Sally Jesse Raphael.
Even so, you might have been taken aback, watching US television last November, when Geraldo's trademark walrus moustache - followed shortly afterwards by Geraldo himself - started showing up amid the inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan.
What followed was more astonishing still: in his abruptly assumed new role as chief war correspondent for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, the former talkshow host began to file reports from the front so unlike any others that only a TV-starved Taliban fighter could have failed to notice that something in the landscape of combat reporting had changed forever. There are many war correspondents, of course, who prize their ethical commitments, who refuse to remain neutral between good and evil. And then there is Geraldo Rivera.
"I've got a New York City fire department hat that I want to put on the head of [Osama bin Laden's] corpse," Geraldo explained when he arrived. "We want Osama bin Laden to end up either behind bars or six feet under or maybe just one foot under," he added soon after, "or maybe just as a pile of ash." Listening to US bombing raids, he recalled on air: "Every boom, I kind of said, 'Go for it, boys! How's this, Osama? Remember September 11'! And they were rockin' all night long! Rockin', rockin'. I mean, imagine, if we're here a couple of miles away, we were shaken - I can imagine what the rats in the nest are feeling."
If he found Bin Laden, he told one reporter, he would "kick his head in, then bring it home and bronze it."
Here was a new kind of war reporter - one who pointedly refused to deny, in a live exchange with a studio anchor, that he was at that moment breaking all journalistic precedent by carrying a gun.
We are sitting in his five-storey modernist waterfront home in New Jersey. Geraldo (and it is always "Geraldo", never Rivera, a fact reinforced by his unnerving habit of referring to himself in the third person) has been back for a few weeks from a tour of duty encompassing Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Israel and Sudan, having left NBC after September 11th, determined, as he puts it, to "go to war".
"My passport is an encyclopaedia of every place you don't wanna go," the 59-year-old says proudly. "I've got shot at on five continents."
Outside, moored at his private dock, sits his 20-metre yacht - the full-time crew live in an apartment downstairs - and a smaller cruiser he uses to commute to New York. It's everybody's stereotype of the millionaire TV star's lifestyle. "I am my stereotype," Geraldo says brightly.
Rumours have ricocheted around the press contingents wherever Geraldo has landed that have the effect of making him look like a fool.
There was the story about how US reporters in Afghanistan allegedly excluded him and his entourage from their Thanksgiving dinner last November, for example, or the often-repeated claim that Geraldo has been denied access to the American military in the field. Some have claimed that the same three Northern Alliance soldiers could be observed performing manoeuvres in a suspiciously large number of his pieces to camera.
Meanwhile, Fox's ratings have soared: following a post-September 11th surge it now routinely outstrips CNN, its main cable rival, in primetime.
WHAT about that gun, though? With journalists targeted as never before in the Afghan conflict, Geraldo was heavily criticised for endangering their lives still further by effectively becoming a combatant. This irritates him, too.
"Afghanistan was not like Palestine, or the civil war in Guatemala, or the coup in Chile, or the Philippines jungle, or how many other f*****g s**tholes I've been in, right? It wasn't frontline here, army there. The day I arrived, four journalists were killed - you think you could hold up a press card to a member of al-Qaida and say, 'Don't touch me, I'm a member of the working press?' Please! That's such sophomoric nonsense!" So you did have a gun? "I don't think that's relevant. Certainly, I was surrounded by guns, though. I was a mini-warlord."
A lot has changed for Geraldo since his days as a talkshow host, but there is a common thread: the journalist as part of the story. A Puerto Rican-Jewish son of a New York restaurant worker, he began his career in local TV news in 1970. "Before then it was very much in the BBC mode - you could interchange the backgrounds: behind me, Brooklyn is burning; behind me, the Bronx is singing. My whole approach was, and still is, 'C'mon, let me show you what it's really like - let's go into the flames, let's dance with the swingers'." The recipe catapulted him to national success for an eight-year stint at ABC, until he was fired, he says, because he wanted to reveal JFK's affair with Marilyn Monroe.
The Al Capone special dragged him speedily out of joblessness, though, and soon he was fighting Nazis on the Geraldo show before moving to a less lurid format, Rivera Live, on CNBC, and then on to special broadcasts for NBC. By now he had developed a reputation for breaking serious stories, too, winning three national Emmys and the Peabody award for television journalism.
Then came September 11th. He told his bosses: "I want to go to war now. The country's changed, history's changed, the world has changed." He was in fighting mood, but NBC had other plans. "They said, 'No, no, you're too valuable, blah, blah, blah'." So he pointed out that a clause in his six-year contract, worth $6m annually, meant he could jump ship.
IT is difficult to describe to anyone who has not watched Fox News how exuberantly partisan it is - notwithstanding its hilariously inappropriate motto, "Fair and Balanced". More seriously, though, a recent investigation by the Baltimore Sun claimed Geraldo had fabricated a report from the site of a US "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan when he was hundreds of miles away. Geraldo accepts he made a mistake but vociferously denies fraud.
After Afghanistan, though, came Israel, where Geraldo's partisanship became a more incendiary matter: he describes himself as a Zionist, but also, after witnessing the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, a "Palestinianist". He outraged Fox viewers by comparing an Israeli procedure which involved writing numbers in marker pen on Palestinian prisoners to the Nazis' tatooing of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps.
Maybe he shouldn't have referred explicitly to the Nazis, he concedes today, "but you know, being a Jew, being a lifelong Zionist, having a Star of David tattooed on your hand" - he waves it in the air to demonstrate - "it gives me some insulation against the anti-Semitism charge they throw out so easily".
Again, after his remarks, he was widely and loudly condemned. Again, though, he seems profoundly unperturbed.
"Remember," he says, "I'm on my eighth generation of TV critics. I've been lampooned on Saturday Night Live by four different comedians. I've been a fixture in American cartoon strips since the mid-70s." He's just doing a job, he says. "I'm a correspondent. I'm proud to be one. I work harder than anybody I know."
- (Guardian Service)
Geraldo Rivera will give the Alternative MacTaggart lecture on August 24th at the Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival, which runs from August 23rd to 25th.