Thursday, March 05, 2015

Nicholas Kristof saves the World

"In the second episode, “Breaking the Cycle of Poverty,” Kristof returns to his roots: foreign poverty porn. Journeying from West Virginia to Haiti to Colombia, viewers see mothers and children in tears, facing terrible choices. Assisted at each location by celebrity guides like Jennifer Garner — an attempt to reach audiences otherwise uninterested in such gloomy subjects — Kristof tries to explain how global poverty works and what Americans can do to get these kids out." "The US-backed coup of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which prompted a United Nations peacekeeping mission that will enter its eleventh year in June, goes unremarked. The conditions that caused the 2008 food riots and unseated the prime minister are not discussed. And the cholera outbreak after the 2010 earthquake that the UN is blamed for starting is nowhere mentioned."