Immigration with Geraldo

Covering a story for BorderBeat.net last Thursday I attended a Geraldo Rivera interview at the Fox Theater in downtown Tucson. Rivera spoke with Tucson Weekly reporter and UA journalism professor Jim Nintzel about immigration and racism.

The full details of their conversation will be in my article. What I wish to discuss here is how I felt Rivera's message was skewed by its delivery, because that is what strikes me the most as I reflect upon the interview.

With Rivera, I feel that his often brash style and unreasonable statements undermine an otherwise well-guided ideology.

To see what I mean by a brash style that can interfere with his message and obscure a point, one need look no further than his appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show in April, 2007.



While both men act in a manner that I find to be unprofessional of "experts" and journalists that are supposed to be having a substantive conversation, I find myself siding with O'Rielly (which is rare) in this instance.

Geraldo seems to get too caught up on what he thinks are O'Reilly's attempts to score a "cheap political point" that he fails to recognize O'Reilly's valid and underlying message: the drunk driver should have never been in town to commit the DUI in the first place. He should have been deported earlier from being convicted of several other crimes.

While he didn't scream at Nintzel last Thursday, Rivera did deliver his message in ways that seemed to undermine his point.

In the introduction to the interview, Rivera took what was supposed to be a few opening remarks and stretched it out to a 20 minute, politically charged narrative that ended with a plug for his new book.

Rivera spoke of his well intentioned ideas and astute observations on immigration issues. The topics ranged from the racism of Republican rhetoric to solutions for illegal entry into the U.S.

Unfortunately, his message was marred in egotistical language and somewhat outrageous demands. For example, Rivera insisted that President Bush use his pardon ability, as many outgoing presidents do on their final days in office, to free and deport every imprisoned illegal immigrant. Rivera thinks that this will be a good-will statement toward a new beginning in border and race relations.

Making such claims, while promoting his book and not allowing his interviewer to get much of a word in edgewise, I ended up leaving the interview with a vague feeling of dejavu. I felt like I had seen a watered down version of something from the latter part of Jessie Jackson's career, after he became a characature of his former self.