Geraldo may want to wash his hands after shaking with GIs.
Dean Staley and Joe Caffrey, the KSTP-TV, Channel 5, team embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq, got their own slice of the Geraldo Rivera story last week.
Viewers may have seen Staley and Caffrey's piece Wednesday on 5's late news. Looking like a Peshmurga fighter by way of Orvis outdoor fashion, Rivera conceded that he felt scolded, but that, after a shower and a beer, he was determined to get back into the action.
Staley sent an e-mail a couple of days later, saying, "Joe and I were working on a story in our camp here in the middle of the desert." (The two have been moving back and forth by helicopter but at the time of the Rivera encounter were somewhere near Karbala).
"We looked up, and there were Geraldo and his producers climbing out of a Humvee." Asked if Rivera seemed at all remorseful about the situation, especially since he was still denying any awareness of the military's displeasure with him and accusing the "rats" at NBC, MSNBC and CNBC of "stabbing me in the back" with "a pack of lies," Staley thought, no.
"He was not remorseful. He seemed tired. (He said he had spent several weeks in Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, where he had been for a week.) "He said he felt scolded but that infantry troops he had been embedded with wanted him to stay." As Staley and Caffrey showed in their filmed report, Rivera signed a few autographs, exchanged a few soul hugs and headed off for the flight back to professional exile in Kuwait. He could have been the drummer for some aging rock band choppering out of the Arizona State Fairgrounds show.
Say what you will about Geraldo, a self-aggrandizing cartoon, an action junkie, you name it: The guy is in no danger of living a small, gray, forgettable life.
Staley went on to say, "A handful of troops here wanted pictures with G and autographs. A few shook his hand. Others here wanted to harm him, were disgusted with him, thought he should have been sent home in a Humvee (a 40-hour drive south through the desert).
"We later found out a few who shook his hand had put those hands in unmentionable places prior. Army justice?"
The Rivera and Peter Arnett stories have been quickly and appropriately pushed aside as the sideshows they are. Primarily, they are a distraction for other media types — ripe, easy fodder for columnists and radio fulminators.
Meanwhile, the real work of covering the war goes on, the vast majority of it covered quite well by lower-key reporters and photographers like Staley and Caffrey, CNN's grisly Walt Rodgers and the perpetually sand-encrusted Ryan Chilcote.
But anybody who has vented indignantly over Rivera's and Arnett's transgressions should reflect a moment on criticism heaped on CNN's Aaron Brown. His crime, it seems to me, is largely that he isn't Geraldo or Arnett enough.
Brown is getting ripped for the way he is forever starting and pausing and re-reconsidering precisely the right question, while attention-getting correspondents like Rivera fire away with whatever makes for hot, combat-wrangler eye and ear candy.
For all the time we've spent watching Brown the past three weeks, it would be nice if he'd discipline himself to questions no longer than 25 words. But at least the questions he (eventually) asks are thoughtful and demonstrate a desire to avoid gross redundancy.
Dean Staley and Joe Caffrey, the KSTP-TV, Channel 5, team embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq, got their own slice of the Geraldo Rivera story last week.
