As Geraldo Rivera rolls from triumph to triumph - the historic opening of Al Capone's vault, the thought-provoking Charlie Manson interview, the Satanism ''investigation,'' and of course, the incident at the Skinheads' Ball - the usual jackal pack of critics has gathered to savage the man and his work. ''Trash TV,'' they call it. ''News punk,'' they call Rivera. ''Geraldo journalism,'' I call it. Actually, so does he.
Prophets are always misunderstood in their time. This televisual genius is in fact almost singlehandedly leading us to the next TV age: participatory TV. Our relationship with the box is evolving toward more personal involvement in what appears, in reception and transmission.
Who among us has not at times wanted to bop a sleazy, obnoxious TV host on the nose? But only Geraldo has given us the chance (the role of ''us'' on this occasion played by a 19-year-old Nazi with a tattoo on his head). Only Geraldo has thus offered up his body and blood, a sacrament of communion between audience and host. And only Geraldo could, broken nose and all, not only finish taping the show, but wrap two more that day. The great ones play with pain.
As University of California sociologist Todd Gitlin puts it, ''people don't want the old-fashioned kind of news because they know there is nothing they can do about it. But these new shows offer them a chance to get involved. They can call a number. They can make a difference.'' Geraldo is empowering.
Pioneer that he is, Geraldo stands nonetheless upon the shoulders of giants. Perhaps the most extraordinary early work in this vein appeared on the old David Letterman show - not the late night version, but the live morning show for which he first won acclaim. Letterman's hip lunacy was in itself a bizarre addition to the housewife's ordinary diet of soap operas and game shows. But the strangest moment of all occurred every day in the middle of the show.
ELECTRIFYING
NBC morning programming traditionally breaks away at the top of the hour for a two-minute newscap. To keep the Letterman flow going, however, the network instead decided to wheel out Edwin Newman, the dean of network newscasters, to read the news on Letterman's show. Live. Before a studio audience.
Why some bright young VP in one of the networks' news divisions hasn't adapted this to the regular evening news will always escape me. It was electrifying. Newman would announce that ''235 people were killed today when an Air France DC-9 burst into flames, moments after . . .'' and the rest would be lost in the horrified gasps of the crowd. Eyebrows arched, he would intone that ''Attorney-General Edwin Meese promised today he would take personal charge of an investigation into administration ethics,'' and the crowd would collapse into giggles. It was a return to the days of the town crier, or perhaps the newsreel.
We seek a more direct, more human interaction with television because the medium as we have known it has failed us. We are content no longer either to act the obedient masses or to find in television our opiate. If Geraldo is a freak show, it is only a measure of the desperation of the networks to hold us in their slipping grasp. For we have now a means of escape.
It is man's nature to be free; far from submit passively to mass manipulation, he will when challenged find new ways to be free. And each new discovery adds to his predisposition. So grows the inevitability of human freedom. Everything about him tells modern man he is an individual; everything sent to destroy his individuality has instead been turned to its service.
Computers, it was once thought, would enslave us. There would be one leviathan computer somewhere, telling the rest of us what to do. Instead, man innovated. There are now millions upon millions of personal computers, machines the size of books with whole libraries in their circuits, and totalitarian states try in vain to stop their distribution.
The assembly line was once to be the model of our industrial future. Either it would break man's will, or so alienate him as to spark a revolution, but the logic of economic efficiency, it was thought, made it inescapable. Well of course, man escaped: man innovated. Less and less of the labor force still works in large factories; more and more of those that remain man flexible work-stations, with many different tasks and decisions to carry out. Mindless repetition, as it happens, is inefficient.
So it is with TV. Remember when television was going to turn us into a murmuring, nodding mass of simpletons? Instead, the mass audience of broadcast TV, to the dismay of the networks, is streaming into the multiplying channels of satellite, cable, and pay-per-view transmission, not to mention home video, where it finds a vast array of offerings to every conceivable taste.
Man resists conformity; man innovates.