Geraldo Rivera

One of the media’s most enduring broadcasters, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Geraldo Rivera, is a Correspondent at Large at NewsNation after departing from Fox News in 2023. A journalist, political commentator, author, and attorney, Rivera has an extensive history in the media industry.

He joined Fox in 2001 as a war correspondent following the 9/11 attacks. Rivera reported from Charleston, SC, on the horrific, racially-motivated massacre in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and on the riots that followed the death in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, MD. Deeply engaged in reporting the recent spike in urban violence, Rivera provided live coverage of the funeral of the fallen NYPD officers Wenjian Liu, Raphel Ramos, and Brian Moore. Additionally, Rivera hosted hour-long specials, exposing the cushy life in prison of condemned killer Scott Peterson, the 35th anniversary of the overdose death of Elvis Presley, and the untimely death of his longtime friend, comedian Joan Rivers. In 2009, he secured an exclusive interview with Joe Jackson just after the death of his son Michael. Rivera had previously interviewed the late Michael Jackson on the evening before his 2005 trial and acquittal for child molestation charges.

Rivera also took part in extensive coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as many other natural and man-made disasters. A native New Yorker outraged by the terror attacks of 9/11/01, Rivera took a major pay cut and left CNBC’s “Rivera Live” to become an FNC senior war correspondent, providing weeks of dramatic live reports from Tora Bora, Afghanistan, during the initial siege on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout. Rivera returned to Afghanistan ten more times to cover Operation Enduring Freedom and later traveled to Bethlehem to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict live from the Church of the Nativity siege in Bethlehem. He also covered the Iraqi elections from Baghdad and did a total of eleven extended assignments in Iraq, riding out of the country on what all expected would be America’s last military convoy leaving Iraq in 2011. One of his favorite live television moments came on May 1st, 2011 when Rivera anchored FNC’s coverage of the successful raid that took down Osama bin Laden.

Rivera began his 45-year career as a television reporter at WABC-TV in New York, where he presented a series exposing the deplorable conditions at the Willowbrook State School, for which he received a Peabody award. These historic reports are credited with ending America’s policy of institutionalizing the developmentally disabled, leading to government investigations, institutions across the nation being eventually shut down, and the civilized world adopting small, community-based housing as an alternative. The subsequent sea change in the treatment of the mentally disabled is Rivera’s most important contribution to the well-being of society. Before becoming a member of the original cast of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Rivera presented the first television broadcast of the infamous Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination of President John Kennedy as host of ABC’s “Good Night America.” He then began an eight-year association with ABC’s “20/20” as an investigative reporter. One of his hour-long reports, “The Elvis Cover-Up,” was for more than two decades “20/20’s” highest rated shows. In 1987, Rivera began producing and hosting “The Geraldo Rivera Show” for 11 years.

Rivera is a graduate of the University of Arizona and Brooklyn Law School and the author of seven books, including two best sellers, “Exposing Myself” and “His Panic.” He is a philanthropist who donates and raises millions to aid various causes, including education and the care and treatment of the autistic.