Bad News From Breaking Bad
You’ve heard the old chestnut: ‘No publicity is bad publicity’. Well, the folks at the National Cancer Coalition are re-thinking that one!
This ‘charity’ was recently listed as #21 on the “America’s Worst Charities” rankings by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting.
OK, by any definition, that’s not good publicity.
But now it turns out that popular TV show Breaking Bad has inadvertently helped generate $125,000 in donations to the charity over a three year period.
For years, AMC (the cable net airing Breaking Bad) ran a website that allowed fans to give money to a cancer charity on behalf of the terminal lead character. In the show, the son of a character whose father suffers from cancer sets up a website to raise money for his dad’s treatments. AMC decided to set up a parallel, real site to channel contributions from sympathetic viewers to a worthy cancer charity.
Unfortunately, apparently without due diligence, they picked the National Cancer Coalition. [I wonder if that PA’s still on the job?!]
The Times/CIR investigation found that about 1% of all the cash raised by solicitors for the charity over the past decade was given to organizations or to patients. Read about the whole episode here.
Why are we writing about this?
Because back when we first covered the the “Worst 50 Charities” reporting, we pledged to do our part to “drain the swamp“. And a key piece of the plan we advocate is to publicize and ostracize the abusers. We’ll do that every chance we get.
Roger and Tom
2 responses to “Bad News From Breaking Bad”
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Roger and Tom,
Can you also reveal who their solicitors and consultants have been/are?
John,
You can find the list of solicitors here http://www.tampabay.com/americas-worst-charities/solicitors/list. Also there’re other valuable resource links in our post titled: “Read This. Then Shower” at http://www.theagitator.net/hot-research/read-this-then-shower/
Roger