The funniest moment at a recent Hollywood press screening for The U.S. vs. John Lennon came when the mug of a certain despised newsmaker–who was at the height of his evil powers in the early 1970s–filled the screen and the attending media responded with a loud, sustained hiss. Here's a hint: the newsmaker WAS NOT Richard M. Nixon; his craggily, misshapen, sweat-stained fright mask would flash onscreen immediately after the solicitor of the hiss to indifferent entertainment journalist silence. Nope, the talking head that got the universally applied snake impression was none other than Geraldo Rivera. Ironically, Rivera, in this documentary, testified for the main figure defying authority–white knight John Lennon–and not the criminal Republican administration then in power that was trying to silence the peacenik Beatle. That Fox newsman Geraldo cheerleads for the criminal Republican administration now in power obviously was lost on Geraldo, but not this smirking crowd of scribes.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.