Live Aid

Live Aid was a multi-venue rock music concert held on July 13, 1985. The event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in order to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Billed as a "global jukebox", the main sites for the event were Wembley Stadium, London, attended by 72,000 people, and JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, attended by about 90,000 people, with some acts performing at other venues such as Sydney and Moscow. It was one of the largest scale satellite link-ups and TV broadcasts of all time -- an estimated 1.5 billion viewers in 100 countries watched the live broadcast.

Criticisms and controversies

Bob Dylan's performance generated controversy for his comment:

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I hope that some of the money...maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe...one or two million, maybe...and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks...

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He is often misquoted, as on the Farm Aid web sitehttp://www.farmaid.org/site/PageServer?pagename=aboutus_history, as saying:

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Wouldn't it be great if we did something for our own farmers right here in America?

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In his biography Bob Geldof was extremely critical of the remark; he states:

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He displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.... Live Aid was about people losing their lives. There is a radical difference between losing your livelihood and losing your life. It did instigate Farm Aid, which was a good thing in itself, but it was a crass, stupid, and nationalistic thing to say.

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Anarchist band Chumbawamba released a record called Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records in 1986. They viewed the Live Aid concert with cynicism, suggesting that performers were in it for themselves as much as the people they were professing to help.

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Although an admirer of Bob Geldof's generosity and concern, Fox News TV host Bill O'Reilly has been critical of the Live Aid producer's oversight of the money raised for starving Ethiopian people, noting in June 2005 that much of the funds were siphoned off by Mengistu Haile Mariam and his army. O'Reilly believes that charity organizations operating in aid-receiving countries should control donations, rather than possibly corrupt governmentshttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,158902,00.html.

Related Topics:
Fox News - Bill O'Reilly - Mengistu Haile Mariam

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Tim Russert, when interviewing Bono on Meet The Press shortly after O'Reilly's comments, addressed this concern of O'Reilly and others to the pop singer. Bono responded that corruption, not disease or famine, was the greatest threat to Africa, agreeing with the belief that foreign relief organizations should decide how the money is spent. On the other hand, the pop singer said that it was better to spill some funds into nefarious quarters for the sake of those who needed it than to stifle aid because of possible thefthttp://msnbc.msn.com/id/8332675/.

Related Topics:
Tim Russert - Bono - Meet The Press

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