Drawing a Finer Line Between Real News and Geraldo

Last day.

On Wednesday, the final gasp of the November ratings sweeps, “Eyewitness News” reporter Marianne Bannister blew the lid off of pantyhose on KABC-TV Channel 7 (“This is a control top”), and KCBS-TV Channel 2 teased a story by showing an outline of a male and asking, “Who is this guy? Find out today at 5 on ‘Action News.’ ” They were television’s most searing journalese since Channel 2’s suspenseful report, earlier in November, on walking in high heels.

On a more somber note, Wednesday was also the day that the fissure separating tabloiders and so-called mainstream media narrowed to a barely discernible hairline.

The catalyst was Denise Brown, sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, who was murdered last June with her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman. The vehicle was Geraldo Rivera.

It wasn’t the first time she had accused O.J. Simpson of slaying his former wife, Nicole. But doing so for the first time in the course of a formal TV interview--especially with the high-profile Rivera--guaranteed the fireworks that followed.

Her Tuesday night comments about Simpson (“He did it . . . he murdered my sister”) were a deafening cannonball that resonated on newscasts throughout Wednesday louder than the guns of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in effect merging talk-show host and former ABC News reporter Rivera with the so-called legitimate media that he loves to disparage.

It’s true that Rivera, since being fired by ABC in 1985, had gained entre to regular newscasts on those occasions when KCBS, the station that airs his syndicated program here, chose to graft him onto its own “Action News” in a cross-promotion strategy designed to assist both parties in the ratings. And in 1988, there were those news clips of the infamous “Geraldo” race ruckus that earned the host a broken honker, the bandages for which he proudly wore like a Purple Heart.

But his interview with Denise Brown, followed Wednesday by obnoxious rebuttals from those ever-tasteful Simpson attorneys, Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran Jr., was the first time within memory that a Rivera interviewee, and not just himself, had made news.

Unfortunately, it was hard separating the two.

It was Simpson attorney Shapiro, arrogantly saying that he and his associates would “forgive” the victims’ families for speaking out against their client, who set off Denise Brown and sent her to Rivera.

That she gave her first full-blown television interview on Simpson’s alleged guilt to Rivera was significant, and unfortunate, for it automatically gave her account a tabloid taint (the curse of Geraldo) it didn’t deserve, and him respectability he didn’t deserve.

ABC’s “PrimeTime Live”--the program on which Denise and other members of the Brown family had given a much more subdued interview last September concerning the murders--had scheduled its own interview with her for Thursday night, one it reportedly had anticipated getting exclusively. Excerpts of that accusatory interview, with questioner Diane Sawyer, were also in circulation Wednesday. As were portions of a previous interview that Joan Lunden had conducted with Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman, on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Goldman indicated then that he, too, felt Simpson was guilty.

But it was Rivera who struck first this week with Denise Brown.

Not that “PrimeTime Live” or “Good Morning America” have been noticeably holier than any other somersaulting media in covering the Simpson-Goldman case, only that when it comes to perceptions of sensationalism, Rivera carries to every story a ton of baggage that tends to overwhelm the message.

In fact, it was not his rambunctious daytime program, “Geraldo,” on which Rivera spoke to Denise Brown about the case. For whatever reason--whether her choice or his--her comments surfaced on Rivera’s lower-key CNBC cable interview show, the one where he wears glasses and comes on, comparatively, at least, like C-SPAN. Granting Denise Brown two for the price of one, however, he opened his Wednesday “Geraldo” with an excerpt from her CNBC interview and a promise of future chats with other members of her family, then turned to his show’s main agenda: “When we come back from commercial, Eddie Sexton and his dirty family secrets exposed!”

What were Rivera’s secrets vis a vis Denise Brown? Katie Couric wanted to know when she interviewed him Thursday on “Today,” the morning show on NBC, which also owns CNBC. Rivera told Couric that he had been pursuing an interview with Denise Brown for some time.

Couric wondered if he felt that media interviews of those closely associated with the Simpson-Brown case were in any way injurious to the O.J. Simpson trial, being presided over by Judge Lance Ito.

No, Rivera didn’t think so. “Judge Ito has his job,” he said, “and you and I have our job.”

Our job. The NBC News job and his job. One job, one entity. They were all in this together, raising clasped hands like candidates at a political rally. The line separating so-called legitimate news and Geraldo news was now barely visible to the naked eye, a fact symbolized by Rivera’s union with Couric and NBC legal analyst Jack Ford in a discussion of the Murder Case of the Century.

The return of Geraldo Rivera was now complete. The time was right for it; the news environment of the ‘90s demanded it. TV’s elder statesman of sleaze had gone around, and come around, and now was being warmly welcomed and tightly embraced like an old pal by those who once had regarded him as a stain on their ranks.

He was back, all right, and even more dramatically, he was back on his own terms.