Stand Up 2 Cancer
By: Rachel Sklar
Big morning TV event, as you know from yesterday's newsblast: Three anchors, three networks, one trio of fierce competitors moving semi-awkwardly around the city together — all in the name of standing up to cancer. Or should I say they'll "Stand Up 2 Cancer" — the name of the ambitious campaign launched by the three networks as one to raise money to fund research to fight the disease, leading up to an hour fundraiser on September 5th, 2008, to be broadcast simultaneously on all three networks.
It's going to be a big event, as signaled by its debut ad featuring all manner of stars literally standing up to cancer — Susan Sarandon and Tobey Maguire and Morgan Freeman and Sidney Poitier and of course Lance Armstrong as Eddie Vedder's "Rise" plays in the background — and donations can be as low as a dollar, to buy a star to honor a loved one with cancer. That translates into a lot of money, considering how prevalent the disease is worldwide. Each of the anchors sitting there had watched a close family member fight the disease: Couric, who lost her husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer; Brian Williams, who lost his sister, Mary Jane Esser, to breast cancer, and Charlie Gibson, whose said on the show that he'd lost both his parents to the disease and whose wife, Arlene, had had breast cancer. I can't imagine that viewers could have watched that segment without thinking of loved ones lost to the disease (I know I didn't).
In the meantime, though, for media watchers it was hard not to notice that this big occasion occasioned another event: the return of Katie Couric to "Today," almost two years to the day after she departed her longtime morning-show home for the, er, challenges of helming the "CBS Evening News." Watch it below:
2 comments:
Before you sit down and right your check to this “Stand up to Cancer” initiative, think about this…Cancer research is already supported by BILLIONS of tax dollars every year. The National Cancer Institute alone gets over $5 Billion dollars a year. And at the same time, when the academic, biomedical industry and pharmaceutical industry keep pushing for more expensive high tech solutions to cure disease, they do not advocate the basic needs of the American people. They are not supporting effective healthcare reforms that can save lives and prevent cancer. They have allowed our environmental laws to slacken which increases the rate of cancer. They promote dangerous high tech biological research in this country without any safety oversight to ensure public health and safety.
Stop giving your hard earned money to these money-making large non-profit organizations and biomedical institutions until you see them TAKE ACTION with results to FIX our failed healthcare system, INCREASE environmental protection and place EFFECTIVE OVERSIGHT over biological labs that are performing dangerous basic research throughout this country. We first have to have a system in place to prevent cancer. Then we can build an effective system to cure it.
Don’t fall prey to this sympathy “Stand up for Cancer” gimmick. You are wasting your money. Instead, how about throwing a fund raising party to fix our failed medical system? Would not that make more sense?
I do happen to agree with you. I believe we let a "pandora's box" of chemicals out into the wild without proper oversight.
Under the the Bush regime, tax dollars to the NCI and CDC have been in decline.
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