From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Geraldo's War
When showbiz is news, ignorance prevails.
A couple of days after Fox News hired Geraldo Rivera away from CNBC to be its hunter-gatherer in Afghanistan, a friend of mine, a media personality, made a counterintuitive prediction. Dismissing my conviction, shared by every sentient being in Christendom, that Mr. Rivera would prove to be an embarrassment to his new employers, she said: "He'll turn out to do fabulous work in Afghanistan. Here are the reasons: It's his last chance to be taken seriously. He becomes excited by war. Because of his dark good looks, and his vaguely Tajik mustache, some idiot fighters there will think he's more sympathetic than the paler correspondents. And on top of all that he'll do anything--anything--to show Roger Ailes [the head of Fox News] his appreciation for this big chance. So, I say, watch that boy!"
I did watch him. She was wrong.
Mr. Rivera, who appears daily from the front line on Fox's news programs--popping up like a tawdry jack-in-the-box on "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hannity & Colmes" and every other news segment, it seems, morning, noon and night--has turned the war zone into a vast shrine to himself.
In his first segment late last month, a report from the tribal territories of Pakistan, Mr. Rivera struck the theme of personal peril, one to which he has clung tenaciously ever since. Hamming it up before the camera--as two bemused guards from the Khyber Rifles posed behind him--he gave us his spiel, and this vulgar syllogism: Here's Geraldo; Geraldo is in a dangerous place; so Geraldo has cojones.
We saw him again, days later, standing next to tanks atop a hill by Tora Bora, thought to be the hideout of Osama bin Laden. The anchor, Rita Cosby, presented him in a manner so worshipful that I was sure that she must be taking the mickey: "It's perhaps the most dangerous place in the world, and you won't find any journalist with the guts to stand their [sic] ground and get the story. That is, any journalist except Geraldo Rivera. . . . Geraldo, how did you get there?" Over the days he's been in Afghanistan, I've begun to detect almost a smirk from the anchors when they lob him these cues, as if they were joshing him mildly, sending invitations to self-parody. Do your thing now, Geraldo!
So the anchor, Laurie Dhue, says: "Geraldo, covering a war is always risky. You're no stranger to risk. You've covered many dangerous assignments from the front lines. How does this one rate?" And Bill O'Reilly says: "Have you felt any personal danger yourself? And who's protecting you?" And Mr. Rivera, who's really the subject of the story--lest you thought, in a moment of stupidity, that it was about Afghanistan--reveals that he is carrying a gun, and that he is surrounded by "four, five, six armed guards."
You can imagine what that does for the foreign correspondents' ecosystem in Afghanistan, and to regular journalists who have no comparable funds. It immediately ups the ante and puts in danger anyone else who does not pay for a clutch of bodyguards. (Mr. Rivera also has 20 porters, he has revealed on air, each paid "what amounts to a week's wages for a night's work--marking each hand to make sure no one comes back for seconds.")
Last Thursday came the apogee, the Perfect Moment, in which Mr. Rivera, while taping a segment near Tora Bora, was apparently shot at by a sniper. We heard a ping (or was it a zing?); Mr. Rivera fell to the ground, microphone still in hand, and carried on with his commentary, a tad breathless. Of the bullet, he revealed later that "I won't say it parted my hair, but it was close." At last, here was the footage Fox had been waiting for--the money shot, as it were--and the network has replayed it ad nauseam.
But viewers might be forgiven for reacting cynically. Afghanistan is a hazardous place, for sure, but this on-camera action seemed just too convenient--too precisely like something the image-doctor had ordered. Besides, Mr. Rivera fell forward from a crouching posture and kept talking on the floor. Too operatic, if you ask me. In real danger, one doesn't keep talking to the camera; and actually, you'd have expected the cameraman to turn and point the camera toward the action, not to keep it on Mr. Rivera.
But Mr. Rivera is the action. Here we have the newsman as both message and messenger. Unlike CNN, which has, in Nic Robertson and Satinder Bindra, two genuinely investigative war correspondents, Fox News has fallen into the old trap of assuming that Americans prefer to watch familiar personalities rather than to learn unfamiliar things.
The Geraldo phenomenon would not be so objectionable if he were in pursuit of some hitherto unknown verity. If he were really carving a fresh chunk of reality out of dangerous terrain, I'd doff my hat to his fearlessness. But when has Mr. Rivera brought us anything that we didn't already know, anything other than platitudes dressed in combat fatigues?
Once again, we're being sold a lifestyle--that of the homeboy mixing it with bandidos. This is a jejune genre, a fallback on a familiar entertainment formula. Here, showbiz invokes showbiz in the guise of news. And ignorance, as always, prevails.
Geraldo Rivera can be seen on the Fox News Network any night of the week.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
