As a long-time Sudan advocate, I hate to admit this, but I don't think it can be denied: in more than a few cases recently, popular culture has willingly turned the situation in Darfur into an object for entertainment and entertainment alone.

I'm not talking about celebrity efforts like George Clooney and Don Cheadle's awareness-raising trips to Darfur (efforts which I admire). Rather, I mean to reference phenomena like Sacha Baron Cohen's 100% unfunny "Darfive" joke in Brüno. Or Uwe Boll's upcoming feature-length film on Western Sudan, which is sure to trivialize the suffering of the over 2.5 million Darfuris who have been violently displaced from their homes by Sudan's authoritarian government. (Boll, after all, is the guy who first made his name directing a movie adaptation of a video game where the main objective is to kill zombies.) Or the exploitative seventh season of 24, which featured Jack Bauer fighting ethnic cleansing in "Sangala," a made-up African nation that shares some family resemblances with Darfur.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not generally opposed to Hollywood portraying or borrowing from current events. Nor do I think that popular media have a special responsibility as far as narrative accuracy and character realism are concerned: if the main antagonist in Uwe Boll's Darfur doesn't resemble Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, I won't complain.

Rather, my anger is directed at the decision-makers who neglect the priority of news and actionable information for the sake of monetizing shock value and what they see as the "foreign."

Let me explain by way of some facts and numbers:
- March 4, 2009: Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir expels fourteen major aid organizations from Sudan, effectively shuttering a vital humanitarian aid system for millions of internally displaced persons.
- July 10, 2009 (so, not longer after the incident above): NBC Universal releases Brüno in U.S. theaters. In the movie, Sasha Baron Cohen's title character says: "Darfur is old news...what about Darfive?" (The play on words here leans on the word "Darfur" itself, which is properly pronounced Dar-Four.)
- In total: In 2009, NBC ran 50 times as many television stories about Brüno than they did about Darfur.
- In total: In 2005, NBC along with the major networks ran 12 times as many television stories about Tom Cruise than they did about Darfur. This, during a year in which the Sudanese government was well on its way to murdering a population larger than the population of New Orleans.

What's the point of citing the evidence above? Well, this is where my earlier mention of the "foreign" comes into relief.

Imagine for a moment that we aren't talking about the Darfur conflict, but a separate conflict that has seen the mass murder, systematic rape, and wholesale displacement of San Francisco. In this case, how would the U.S. caterers of popular media and pop culture respond? Five months into the Northern California tragedy, would they accept and market jokes about it, with the cover that such jokes are just "satire" or "cultural commentary"? Would they steal bits and pieces from real stories of mass atrocity, for the sole purpose of glorifying a TV series' macho anti-hero? (Compare true-to-reality films like Hotel Rwanda and United 93 with 24's insipid "Sangala" storyline.) Would these decision-makers readily and immediately exploit the tragedy at hand for the sake of creating consumer entertainment?

Here, I can venture an empirically grounded guess: Give them a large-scale tragedy at home or close to home, and most likely popular media will respond with a sober lens (and rightfully so). But present them with a human-made tragedy that is monumental in impact yet "far away"...and then somehow it becomes acceptable to make a commodity out of ongoing suffering at the expense of actual reporting?

There's something deeply wrong with this picture.