Geraldo Rivera's presence on Fox News is a mixture of Mike Wallace, Jerry Springer and Paul Lynde

The New Yorker

Rivera created a "tizzy" when he spoke out against the border patrol tear-gassing Central American migrants on Monday's edition of The Five, departing from Fox News "orthodoxy," says Troy Patterson. "Not precisely a blowhard, not merely a camera hog, not entirely a slouch, Geraldo is a caricature of a late-twentieth-century news celebrity," says Patterson. "He exemplifies the safari-jacketed glamour and showboating hubris of a breed of TV-news star that is now on the verge of extinction. Perhaps he is too grand to be contained by a regular show. Rather, he strides along like a mutant beast of the infotainment age. Turning chemical weapons on impoverished children is wrong, all wrong, he insists, speaking the obvious to power like a showman with a kernel of Cronkite in his heart."