Geraldo Rivera re: Gary Gilmore. If other media types ascribe to this, f*** them!

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing squad, ABC-TV's Geraldo Rivera was screaming into his mike to his producers at Good Morning, America in New York: "Kill the Rona segment. Get rid of it. Give me air. You'll be able to hear the shots. I promise. You'll be able to hear the shots."

via Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song". MKJ

[Blue_In_AK]

1. One of my all-time favorite books. n/t

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

3. Me too. The book captured so much about all of us.

I read it at age 19 and it haunts me to this day. MKJ

[snowbear]

2. Is Geraldo Rivera still alive?

Dayum. who knew?

[calimary]

6. He only looks that way.

What a frickin' baboon (with apologies to real baboons everywhere).

[NYCGirl]

4. Nothing new — check out the Leopold-Loeb trial from 1924 and

this little goodie (which was dramatized in a nice little James Cagney pre-code film, "Picture Snatcher"):


1928 - Ruth Snyer Executed: Ruth Snyder, a discontented Long Island housewife, convinced her lover, Judd Gray, that her husband was mistreating her. The pair killed him with a sash weight. Their trial was a media frenzy, attended by such celebrities as film pioneer D.W. Griffith and evangelist Billy Sunday. The jury was out 98 minutes before it returned with a guilty verdict. Gray was executed first on January 12, 1928. Snyder followed just a few minutes later. A clever photographer from the New York Daily News, with a camera strapped to his ankle, snapped a picture of her as the juice coursed through her body. It sold 250,000 extra copies and is the iconic image of the 1920s.

http://ehub.journalism.ku.edu/history/1920/1920.html

[sofa king]

5. Uh oh. What has that ass done now?

Pecking the eyes out of a certain dictator's corpse, no doubt.

Geraldo Rivera featured prominently in one of my favorite books, which I wish I still had. It was called The 90's: A Look Back and was written in the late '80s as a sort of spoof on the Time/Life decade books.

In that book, Rivera was one of the three Presidents of the United States who were serving simultaneously because nobody could decide who won the election. The other two Presidents were Ed Begley, Jr. and a dog.

It occurs to me that if you left out Ed Begley and combined Geraldo and the dog, they would have accurately described the decade after the decade it was supposedly chronicling.

[NotGivingUp]

7. he's a sick man