-By Warner Todd Huston
Back in July, Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera posted a nearly nude photo of himself (a selfie, as the kids call it) on Twitter and reaped a whirlwind of condemnation. He may have thought it was behind him until this month when he learned that he lost a speaking engagement at a Catholic University over the image.
Geraldo was scheduled to speak at an upcoming October panel at Duquesne University to talk about the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Duquesne is a Catholic institution and found it wasn’t amused at the 70-year-old’s lack of modesty by posting a nearly nude photo of himself for all to see.
In a statement about the withdrawal of the invitation, Duquesne’s spokeswoman Bridget Fare said:
The administration felt that Mr. Rivera’s decision to post a nearly naked picture of himself on social media was inappropriate and inconsistent with who we are as a Catholic university and therefore asked the Wecht Institute to withdraw the invitation. We warn our students not to put anything inappropriate on social media because of potential consequences–you could consider this teaching by example.
As it happens, Geraldo was the first TV person to air a version of the famed Zapruder film that showed the assassination occurring as it happened that day.
This was reason enough to stay invited, as far as Geraldo was concerned.
Geraldo’s Infamous Semi-Nude Selfie
The Fox Newser released a statement of his own to Politico:
As a Catholic university, I hope the administration of Duquesne over that period was as diligent in condemning real outrage as it has been in censoring my appearance on the JFK panel because of a ‘nearly naked picture.’
“Are all prospective speakers similarly scrutinized, or is my sin receiving special attention? Does the ‘selfie’ over-weigh my Peabody, Emmys, RFK’s and other professional achievements on Duquesne’s scale of morality? Are the students of Duquesne so sensitive and protected that they will be unable to concentrate on the topic being discussed because they cannot unsee the image?
“Further, the process of cancellation was incredibly rude. I was informed last week by a stranger, who introduced himself to me at a hotel bar, only to then tell me that he was on the JFK panel but that it was too bad my appearance had been cancelled because of the offending tweet.
“With the Pirates in contention for the World Series for the first time in a generation, this act by another Pittsburgh institution was incredibly bush league,” Rivera said in his statement.
Amusingly, Geraldo, with his tenuous connection to the assassination, is being replaced by someone with an even more tenuous connection to the shooting: filmmaker Oliver Stone, the nut case who made a failed, conspiracy-laced feature film about the assassination.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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