Baby trading and Angelina Jolie
May 22, 2007
On the manicured lawn between the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh and the Tonle Sap River, a young couple sitting under a banyan tree offered me their 14-month-old son in exchange for my wrist watch.
“Angelina, yes! Angelina, yes!”
All of all the misinformed, parachute journalism that gets slung Cambodia’s way, this story from Earth Times is one of the worst to come along in quite some time. The lead about poor people trying to trade their babies for watches is just the beginning. The idea that they would do so while reciting the name of Angelina Jolie is just completely unhinged from reality.
For starters, the odds that such a couple would possess an English vocabulary beyond “hello” already pushes the limits of mathematical possibility. Further, Western personalities are virtually unknown in Cambodia. (Just ask Ronan Keating.) The chances of some random homeless couple knowing not just about Angelina Jolie, but also her proclivity toward adoption, are about the same as Sam Rainsy becoming Prime Minister.
