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NPR's flawed take on FreeRice.com
Posted at 10:03 AM on December 19, 2007 by Jon Gordon
NPR's Michele Keleman told the FreeRice.com story on Morning Edition the other day. You may recall hearing it on Future Tense and reading about it here as well. To summarize, it's a site built by an Indiana computer programmer that quizzes users on vocabulary. Correct answers result in rice being sent to the U.N. World Food Program. Money for the rice comes from site advertising.
Kelleman's piece missed a key angle to the story: There is no accountability built into FreeRice. Although the operator appears trustworthy and is endorsed by the U.N., there's no way to know how much of the revenue is going to help feed hungry people. FreeRice relies 100% on blind trust. That element deserved mention in the NPR piece.
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