Who Elected Geraldo Anyway?

Egos are sympton of greater problem with our airwaves.

By: Eric Alterman

It is easy to laugh at Geraldo Rivera. The man is, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich deemed him, "a clown". He pretends to duck bullets overhead while delivering his stand-ups. He claims to say the Lord's Prayer over the "hallowed ground" where U.S. troops were killed by friendly fire, but misses his mark by a mere 200 miles.

When nailed for it, instead of an abject apology, Rivera blames the "fog of war" and explains he mixed up two friendly fire sites. This turns out to be a lie. The second friendly fire incident he claims to have mixed up with the first had not happened yet at the time of his report.

No Apology

A newsman with any professional pride or perhaps self-respect might issue a sincere apology and slink off quietly into the night. Not Geraldo. He wants to fight about it. He accuses the reporter who nailed him, David Folkenflick of the Baltimore Sun, of "slander", adding with a bit of egomaniacal hysteria that jumps leaps and bounds beyond mere self-parody: "This cannot stand. He has impugned my honor. It is as if he slapped me in the face and challenged me to a duel. He is going to regret this story for the rest of his career", he cries.

When CNN Anchor Aaron Brown reported on the story, Rivera accused the network of "malignant hypocrisy" and said the story "made me want to puke". Fox viewers are still waiting for an on-air correction of the original report.

It's a clich&éacute; to note that for many journalists it is they, not the war, who are the story. Rivera takes this point of view to its jaw-dropping extreme, exploiting the death of American soldiers to try to give his own reporting a false air of sanctimony. Most journalists want to join in the joke, but the problem with Geraldo is that he is merely an exaggerated version of an existing problem writ large across the entire medium.

Noonan's Delusion

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan has written, "As I watched television I became aware... that the great leaders in our time of trauma were the reporters and anchors and producers of the networks and news stations". It's rather odd to read these silly words on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, alleged scourge of journalistic self-importance and promoter of all things conservative and constitutional.

Nobody elected these television journalists and news-readers to be our "leaders". Nobody attended any rallies in support of their views or conducted any letter-writing campaigns on their behalf. Nobody has even extolled any genuine examples of their wisdom or leadership in print, because, truth be told, it would be impossible.

Television journalists owe their prominence almost entirely to a confluence of events deriving from the fact that Congress - in its 'wisdom' - has decided to subsidize the corporations that own them to the tune of tens of billions of dollars by simply giving away the spectrum upon which their broadcasts are carried - coupled with the fact that most people own televisions for the purpose of entertainment.

As a result, TV journalists earn inflated salaries - indirectly supported by taxpayer dollars - and suffer from inflated egos resulting from their ubiquitous images in our society.

Message vs. Messenger

Alas, exactly as so many of their conservative critics have done, the beneficiaries of this system confuse the message with messengers. In the cut-throat competition that defines network news, each one seeks to top the other by making its public personas into bigger and bigger celebrities.

These celebrities attempt to outshine one another by juicing up their broadcasts to appear more and more dramatic, relying less and less on the mundane business of gathering information and evidence and passing it along to the public who - once again I remind you - is paying for it.

Remember Geraldo was allegedly visiting the friendly fire site days after the incident took place. He was not reporting "news"; rather he was his personal version of what the sociologist Daniel Bell called a "pseudo-event". Even in the midst of war, more and more of what we see on our TV's 24/7 is made up of this kind of self-promotional non-news.

Geraldo's laughable self-importance - purchased at the cost of his own dignity in the quest to glom onto the memory of dead American servicemen - is merely the most visible Frankenstein monster of this morally and intellectually indefensible practice.

But almost all are guilty. The idea that Ms. Noonan can write those words - and her editors can publish them - is further evidence of how far we have fallen from the ideal of a news media that views their job as informing its citizenry.

In the cases of say, Lizzie Grubman and Gary Condit, such attitudes may not matter all that much. But when the issue at hand is war and peace, we have a right to demand more from our media. After all, we're paying for them.