Anderson Cooper does Cambodia

CNN personality Anderson Cooper and his team are in Cambodia to do some shooting for Cooper’s CNN show “Anderson Cooper 360.” So what kind of stuff do you think they plan to cover?

He then intros into a piece he did on Cambodian sex slavery. We learn that in the capital alone there are 10,000 to 20,000 prostitutes and at least 25% are children. The prostitutes are often uneducated, poor, abused, and forced to work long hours. Nicholas Kristoff of the “New York Times” points out that there is a belief there that sleeping with a virgin can cure AIDS and Cambodia now has the highest HIV rate in Asia. We then move on to a Dan Rivers piece about how Cambodia is a pedophile haven. He introduces us to Amit Gilboa, an author who wrote a book about sex-crazed expatriates, or sex-pats as he calls them. One of these sex-pats is Graham Cleghorn, who was actually convicted in 2004 of raping five teenagers. Unfortunately conviction of sex-pats is rare.

Ugggh! This is maddening. Firstly, the number of prostitutes cited is wildly overstated, as this USAID study makes clear. Secondly, when it comes to combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, Cambodia is actually a case study of success. Sadly, though, the news media and NGOs make these same misleading claims week in and week out, so it’s not at all surprising that CNN would mindlessly parrot the same.

Dragging out Amit Gilboa, however, is proof positive of incompetence if not outright bad intentions. Gilboa, as Anderson Cooper may or may not know, partied and whored his way through Phnom Penh in the late 1990s and then wrote a book about it. Or more accurately, he wrote a book about what a bunch of pathetic losers his friends were, and how he was just an innocent observer, repulsed by the debauchery surrounding him but committed to his craft.

Out of fear for his life, Gilboa has refused assignments to Cambodia until, apparently, now. But even today, nearly 10 years after the publication of his book, many of Phnom Penh’s resident expatriates still consider Gilboa not just a wicked hypocrite, but a dirty rotten scumbag for selling out his friends.

Nice work, Cooper.