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NBC's foreign reporting sent Today newscaster Ann Curry to Abyei in southern Sudan. After 20 years of civil war, a referendum is scheduled for January in which the majority-black south is expected to vote for partition from the majority-Arab north. Abyei is such an unusual dateline for an American nightly newscast that you may wonder how Curry managed to persuade NBC News to finance the trip. The answer is celebrity. Curry was traveling with movie star George Clooney, who predicts that the north will go to war rather than permit secession. Clooney warned of 200,000 deaths within the next 100 days.
How rare is a Sudan dateline? There have only been five other reports on all three newscasts combined (all on Darfur) in the past four years. Curry's package was the first since the summer of 2008.
UPDATE: Norman Charles at Nightly Daily sees a recurrent Clooney as Exhibit A in NBC's celebrity trend: "It's becoming more and more difficult to tell Nightly News apart from the shows that follow it--Extra and Access Hollywood."
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