CNN gets a little closer

Every few months I run a Google search on myself to see if anyone is stealing my articles. Today there were no thefts of the list but I was very surprised to see an entry labeled "CNN.com - Transcripts". Of course I followed the link and it turns out that back in October Anderson Cooper read one of my comments on air during a segment at the end of AC 360! How very cool.

The first week of October 2006 CNN sent a couple of teams to Africa to cover the situations in Darfur and the Sudan. Anderson Cooper hosted a week-long special "The Killing Fields: Africa's Misery, the World's Shame". It was, hands down, some of the most disturbing television I have ever seen. Night after night there were stories of such unbelievable suffering. It was so hard to watch but it just didn't seem right to turn away. Cooper often speaks of the importance of bearing witness and this whole week was like that.

Tuesday of that week Dr. Sanjay Gupta posted a blog entry about some of the things he had seen. Inside the camps, he wrote, "They complain bitterly of not enough food and clothing. They wish they had better roofs over their heads than sorghum branches tied together with twine." However, he went on to write, "living conditions throughout much of Chad are so terrible that many people will simply pack up their belongings and move into refugee camps, which ironically offer a better way of life than most people in Chad could ever hope to see."

I was so shocked to see that sentence, that branches and twine were more than people could hope to dream for. I submitted a comment to the AC360 blog and was thrilled to see it actually appear on the site. CNN gets hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments on the blog. They post up to a hundred of them or so per post. From time to time Anderson reads two or three on the air and October 4th he read mine live from Rutshuru.

I can't believe I missed seeing it on air -- it was a Wednesday, I'd signed-up for a class. Fortunately transcripts live forever so I know about it now. CNN does sell individual copies of past shows and I think I'm just geek enough to order one. How often do you get to hear your name on CNN? Until then, it's right there in the records. If you follow the transcript link, scroll all the way to the bottom you'll see this:

COOPER: Jeff, stay safe. Appreciate your reporting. Thank you.

Before we go, we wanted to show you what's on the radar, some of the responses to our programming on the 360 blog.

Sharla Jones from Buckeye, Arizona, writes on the blog, "Watching this series right now on 360 is really making me re-evaluate my own life and how I'm living it... Watching the pain and suffering right now... it made me cry."

This from Kelly in Marietta, Georgia, "It shames me to think that we apparently learned nothing after Rwanda. Why are we, nor the rest of the world, helping more?"

And Claire Colvin of White Rock, British Columbia, writes, "I can't wrap my head around someone fleeing to a refugee camp of their own volition because the conditions there are better. Surely we can do better than this."

I was on CNN. Well, sort of.