Little did he know that as he was mouthing the word journalist, NBC News was busy disavowing Rivera's "scoop" in an in-house bulletin to all bureaus that soon leaked out and got plenty of ink. Howard Kurtz, the respected Washington Post media critic, accused the network of maintaining a double standard for Rivera, allowing him to go with a story that no NBC correspondent could get on the air without further corroboration. "He's our loose cannon," one NBC executive told me in the heat of the controversy. Two weeks later, of course, Rivera, who says he did check out the story "to the extent possible" with the FBI, was fully vindicated. His critics didn't notice. Three months later, the incident still rankles Rivera. As he combs out his mustache in the makeup room one evening, he complains cockily, "That story was widely disbelieved, widely. I'll never be honored in my time."

But the story of Rivera's bid "to climb the food chain of media respectability," as talk-radio host Don Imus gibes, isn't so simple. One contradiction in Rivera's career is that the unorthodox style he would have to shed to join the press club -- his passionate advocacy, his showbizzy sense of how to grab the viewer, his ability to insert himself into the drama, and his tweaking of network suits -- is exactly what has made him a hot media commodity for three decades. Rivera knows that if NBC suddenly "honored" him, Geraldo wouldn't be Geraldo anymore.

The other contradiction is that the very media culture that still wants to shun Rivera has, to a remarkable extent, been defined by him. From the spread of hybrid news magazines (of which he created one of the first, ABC's Good Night America, in 1973) to the profusion of legal talking-head shows to the increasing tabloid bent in news to the blurring distinction between reporter and commentator, Rivera was there before the industry was.

If Rivera ever achieves his lofty goal of being seen as "one of the Wise Men of my generation," it will be on no one's terms but his own. When asked what he most admires about Geraldo, his brother, Craig Rivera, a correspondent for Inside Edition, responds, "His balls, quite frankly." Indeed, at the very moment that he is poised to win readmission to the network fraternity, Rivera's pro-Clinton position in the Lewinsky scandal is destined to seal his renegade status in the news business, which prides itself on neutrality and regards the words Clinton apologist as a deadly epithet.

"When I did O.J., I was able to bite my tongue until the verdict came in," Geraldo says. "But on this one, I couldn't." That, of course, is an understatement. "He doesn't want to be 'accepted' in that way," insists Craig Rivera. "He just wants to please his audience. And if what he does gets him accepted, fine." Ultimately, Rivera wants it both ways. He wants respect as a journalist and the freedom to operate outside the confines of "respectable" journalism.

Rivera's defense of Clinton has been anything but anchorly. In Rivera's lexicon, Clinton is "a horny middle-aged guy condemned for ten blow jobs," Starr is a "sex-obsessed prosecutor" peddling "hearsay crap," House GOP leaders Dick Armey and Tom DeLay are "haters," and Congressman Dan Burton is "Dan 'Scumbag' Burton, father of an illegitimate child."

Rivera insists that his colleagues are "just as biased as I am" but won't admit it. During his high-profile trip to China, Rivera skewered the Washington Post and Newsweek as "sex-obsessed sister publications" that have been "suckling leaks from the breast of . . . Ken Starr." On a recent Rivera Live, Rivera became so impassioned in demanding that the New York Times apologize to Clinton for its incessant coverage of the Whitewater scandal that he threw his note cards at the camera and went to an early break. "My wife yelled at me for losing it," he says. Another time, he railed against the "pretense and hypocrisy" of those who set themselves up as moral arbiters, referring to "a network anchor and his White House reporter" who have been "married eight times between them." (Off-air, he says he was talking about ABC's Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson.) On the Today show, where he appears as an NBC "legal analyst," his friend Katie Couric upbraided Rivera for his lack of balance.