Posted on 11/02/2001 9:28:21 AM PST by Teacup
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Controversial television journalist Geraldo Rivera said Thursday he is quitting his own seven-year-old talk show on CNBC to take a job as a war correspondent for rival cable outlet Fox News Channel.
Rivera, 58, said his decision to return to the trenches of broadcast news was sparked by the Sept. 11 attacks on the America and the U.S. government's resulting war on terrorism.
``I'm a reporter, and this fight against terror is the biggest story of our times,'' Rivera said in a statement prepared for Thursday's broadcast of CNBC's ``Rivera Live.'' ``And as much as I love this job, I can't stay anchored to this desk any longer.''
Rivera said the last broadcast of his show on CNBC would be Nov. 16, after which he would join the news team assembled at Fox News Channel as a war correspondent.
With Rivera's departure, CNBC said it would end his nightly show and extend its business news programming into prime time. Rivera had hosted the topical interview show since 1994.
Rivera's previous experience as a foreign correspondent has included stints covering drug trafficking in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel and more recent conflicts in Central America, the Philippines, Lebanon and the Balkans.
Rivera has won numerous Emmys and other awards since he began his career in 1970 as a reporter with WABC-TV. He sprang to fame in 1972 with an expose of the squalid conditions at Staten Island's Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded.
Since then, the career of the aggressive, often brash journalist and TV host has wavered between spectacular success and embarrassing flops.
He scored a major coup by securing the Zapruder film footage of President John F. Kennedy's assassination for its initial TV presentation. And he logged substantial on-camera time for ABC news magazines ``Good Night, America,'' ``Good Morning, America'' and ``20/20.''
But his heavily hyped, highly rated 1986 prime-time documentary special ``The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults'' proved a bust when the gangster's purported inner sanctum turned up empty. Two years later, Rivera suffered a broken nose on national television when an on-camera brawl erupted between the head of the Congress of Racial Equality and neo-Nazis on his daytime trash talk show ``Geraldo!''
That show, later renamed ``The Geraldo Rivera Show,'' ran 11 years in syndication.
Rivera debuted in prime time on CNBC with ``Rivera Live'' in 1994, several months before the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, and made inroads back to respectability with his extensive coverage of the O.J. Simpson affair.
Reuters/Variety REUTERS
Just one word - BARF! I can't imagine E.D. interviewing him every morning. I may have to switch back to Imus.
HA! HA! HA! I could just see it now.
Fox exclusive! Whoraldo to enter Bin Laden's cave."
Now I agree with that. Christianne is a "war slut"(as called by another repoter) Whoraldo is just a .................well you get the picture, LOL.
That's what we call "damning with faint praise".
AB
I'm intentionally ignoring the main focus of this thread, so I don't become even more nauseous.
Geraldo will also make a guest appearence on the Afghan top rated show, "Veilwatch".
Perhaps this is their "Balance?" That way no one can accuse them of not being balanced? I don't know. Look at it this way. He won't have his own show. He'll be out there with the camels, LOL.
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