ER takes up Darfur cause

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This is a great analysis coming from the UK's Guardian. Read it over slowly and digest it.
To read it in full, click here.
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A few higlights from it:

"The humanitarian disaster unfolding in Darfur was due to receive its most prominent exposure so far on American television last night. But it says much about the interface between politics and celebrity that the coverage was not to be found on any of the three main evening news broadcasts, which have devoted only 10 minutes to the crisis between them since the start of the year. Instead, it was an episode of the hospital drama ER - with the show's heart-throb doctor John Carter (played by Noah Wyle) in the thick of a tragedy the news media have been condemned for neglecting."

"Clooney and fellow celebrities Angelina Jolie and Hotel Rwanda star Don Cheadle are the most high-profile figures in a movement that has been gaining ground for many months, forging an unlikely alliance between leftwing students and rightwing Christians, and spanning both sides of an otherwise bitterly divided Congress. And while humanitarian groups say the Bush administration's response only begins to address the scale of the disaster, it is evident that the campaign has succeeded in influencing the White House."

"The long-term trend is that conservative Christians have become interested in foreign policy questions, including sex trafficking, Aids and third-world debt," said John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "They're adopting approaches to evangelising that Roman Catholics, and other protestants, adopted a generation earlier - the notion that in order to effectively bring people to Christ one has to address their economic and social needs as well as their spiritual needs."