Ed Sheeran Raises Money for Liberia — And Is Promptly Shamed

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Ed Sheeran may be the toast of Buckingham Palace, having received one of the country’s highest honors, the Order of the British Empire, for his services to music and charity. But last week he also received a dubious distinction: the star of the “most offensive” charity campaign of 2017. A charity watchdog group granted him its annual Rusty Radiator Award, accusing him and other celebrities of producing “poverty porn.”

In the video, Mr. Sheeran travels to Liberia, the eighth-poorest country in the world, which was ravaged by Ebola between 2014 and 2015. He sees two homeless boys sleeping on the beach and is troubled by the situation.

“It really does not feel right leaving at all,” Mr. Sheeran says toward the end of the video. “My natural instinct is to just put them in a car and put them somewhere in the city and put them in a hotel until we can get them sorted.”

The video, made for the charity Comic Relief and the Disasters Emergencies Committee, was part of a fund-raising campaign that raised nearly $110 million for various causes, including assistance for children in Yemen, for people affected by the famine in East Africa and for homeless children in Liberia.

That’s the one tiny detail that the critics of the video — and they were legion — couldn’t be troubled by. Instead they piled on, accusing Mr. Sheeran of perpetuating the worst stereotypes, including making himself into a white savior.

One critic wrote that videos like Mr. Sheeran’s “oversimplify complicated, nuanced issues, leaving confused audiences with little more than de-contextualized images of starving children.” Another said the video “creates an artificial distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ” A third — incorrectly — chastised Mr. Sheeran for “not mentioning that he is specifically in the country of Liberia rather than in some unnamed part of the African continent.”

Criticism of the video isn’t completely unwarranted. A shaken Mr. Sheeran places himself at the center of the video, rather than the children, whom he rarely allows to speak for themselves. And there is little context given about Liberian history or its current political situation.

But the reaction to this video is not only overblown but also harmful to the people who need help and those who may want to offer it.

Any non-cynical person who watched the video would have been reminded — or perhaps would have learned for the first time — about a few of the grave problems in Monrovia’s slums and about some of the children who live in them. J. D., one of the boys who speaks with Mr. Sheeran, mentions that he hopes to get an education. In Liberia, such a wish can be a pipe dream: Nearly two-thirds of the country’s children have never set foot in a school. The young boy also tells Mr. Sheeran that his mother and grandfather died of Ebola, two of the nearly 5,000 Liberians killed by the disease.

While the video doesn’t offer a comprehensive history — it’s a little under five minutes long — it does boil down a very complex set of issues. Most important, it’s attention-grabbing. As Nicola Peckett of the Disasters Emergencies Committee told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, “They’re not adverts, they’re appeals” intended to raise funds for specific causes. On that score, this video was a success.

Ed Sheeran was the most-streamed artist of the year on Spotify; his albums have won Grammys, Brit Awards and American Music Awards. One of the runners-up for the Rusty Radiator Award was a video featuring the actor Eddie Redmayne asking people to donate to help those affected by the famine in East Africa. Another featured the actor Tom Hardy asking people to help children in Yemen.

Can there be any doubt that these videos would not have raised a fraction of the money if they featured non-celebrities? If they were not well produced?

I don’t know a lot of people who scroll YouTube looking for videos of civil war or famine. But I know a lot of fans of singers like Mr. Sheeran who would watch him — and probably be moved to donate money to a cause they might know little about because he says it’s worthwhile.

Ideally, such a video would be a hook for a person to learn more about the situation in Liberia. But even if all a person does is donate, does that deserve our condemnation?

The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund, the organization that crowned Mr. Sheeran the worst of the year, has done extensive campaigning on the importance of educating people on how to be more considerate when sharing their experiences in developing countries, including creating a clever and helpful video for how to behave when volunteering. But shaming people like Mr. Sheeran for trying to do something good, especially for people that the rest of the world has forgotten, won’t encourage others to step up. It certainly won’t help kids like J. D.