On the backlash over Good Night, and Good Luck: "Bill O'Reilly does a half-hour show about why my career is over. He brought in some producer that goes, 'I'll never work with him again.' I'm like: 'I don't know who she is! I've never even seen her before.' (Laughs.) And I called my dad and said, 'Well, am I in trouble?' And he's like: 'Do you have a job? Do you have money?' And I said, 'Yes.' He goes: 'Shut up. Grow up. Be a man. What are you afraid of? A lot of people have taken a lot worse chances. You can't demand freedom of speech and say, 'Don't say bad things about me.' "
George Clooney, an outspoken activist on the issue of genocide in Sudan, has issued another missive in his attempts to increase attention on the African country’s humanitarian crisis. The filmmaker and Satellite Sentinel Project co-founder John Prendergast penned an op-ed for Vice News tied to its companion HBO series.
Friday’s episode of Vice, its second-season finale, follows journalist Ben Anderson as he’s embedded in Sudan, exposing the lingering crisis as media attention and international efforts have drifted elsewhere.
It’s that lack of attention with which Clooney and Prendergast take the biggest issue. “The spotlight is fickle — we’re already seeing that with Syria,” they write. “Telling people they should care because they cared 10 years ago doesn’t work.”
This is hardly Clooney’s first time speaking out about the more than 2.5 million people killed and 5 million displaced by the various conflicts in Sudan. He and Prendergast penned another op-ed in The Daily Beast in December — and in his 2012 THR cover story, the actor spoke of being held up at gunpoint in one of his many missions to the region.
Satellite Sentinel Project, which recently announced an expansion of its efforts, is a nonprofit that uses satellite imagery to monitor the violence by Sudan against South Sudan with the hopes of catching early warning signs to deter mass atrocities.
Emmy-nominated Vice, recently renewed for a third and fourth season on HBO, spends half of the upcoming episode, “The Forgotten War,” focusing on the rising violence and on how things have changed for those in the Darfur region since war broke out in 2003. Watch a preview below:
