The College Fix

The tweet seen ’round the world is still having repercussions for newsman Geraldo Rivera.

The veteran journalist, on his Twitter feed Friday, said he was disinvited to serve on an upcoming panel at a Catholic university to mark John F. Kennedy’s assassination because of his “selfie.”

“Just heard Duquesne Univ cancelled my appearance at JFK assassination panel because of ‘selfie’. Fact I first aired Zapruder film less impt,” he tweeted.

The Zapruder film, one of the most famous home videos of the president’s assassination, is set to be discussed at the mid-October conference: “Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

In July, Rivera took a picture of himself – a.k.a a selfie – in which he wore nothing but sunglasses and a white towel draped just above his pubic line, then tweeted the photo with the caption: “70 is the new 50.” He took it down the next morning. The nation had a good chuckle over the incident.

In a subsequent interview on a New York radio show, he blamed his controversial photo tweet on drinking too much tequila and his affinity for the picture, in which he looked tan and toned.

“It seemed like a great idea at the time,” Rivera had said. “I figured they’d cut me some slack because I am so old. … I took it down the next day after I heard from Fox.”

But others continue to find the 2-month-old incident less amusing.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quotes a Duquesne University spokeswoman as saying “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.”

The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law is part of Duquesne University.

The Post-Gazette interviewed an institute advisory member whose son is hosting the panel who said the tweet should not have been that big of a deal: “You’ve got a 70-year-old man with a bath towel around his waist, although granted, it was below the umbilical level. You go to a beach, there are people running on the streets every day, guys in their shorts. How could this bother Duquesne?”

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IMAGE: Twitter screenshot