1985 was a tough year for Geraldo Rivera. The well-known presenter had been in the television news game for 15 years, but things had taken a turn.

His career had gotten off to a promising start.

In 1972, just two years after being hired at Eyewitness News,

the young journalist won a Peabody Award for a piece exposing the mistreatment of patients

with intellectual disabilities at Staten

Island's Willowbrook State School. In fact, the piece was so impactful that after John

Lennon saw Geraldo's reporting, he was inspired to organize a two-night benefit concert at Madison

Square Garden. But despite this auspicious start, Rivera's reputation for incisive, socially conscious reporting

was soon overshadowed by a taste for the sensational.

In 1973, Geraldo taped the pilot for the short-lived evening news program,

Good Night America. The show ended up running intermittently from 1974 to 1977 and gained a

certain level of notoriety for being the first television program to show the Zapruder film.

That's the amateur 8mm home movie which accidentally captured the assassination of President

John F. Kennedy.

Good Night America specialized in these types of items.

Things that were certainly of public interest, but might be

avoided by other news shows out of concerns for good taste. While Geraldo insisted that he was a

hard-hitting, fearless television journalist, a growing chorus of critics started to sniff at him for

being shameless and exploitative.

In a Washington Post opinion piece published in 1987, author Alex Hurd explained

Geraldo's unique appeal like this, quote, he will find the boundaries of taste and the point beyond which the semi-needless discussion of quasi-issues

involving very odd people becomes almost mystical.

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