George Clooney asks a billion TV viewers to help, reaches worldwide and across all major U.S. networks to broadcast the benefit tonight at 8pm

By Robin Rowe

Beyonce to sing from London in Hope for Haiti, Madonna will sing from NY

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 1/22/2010 – George Clooney, who’d organized the widely televised benefit for victims of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, was in New York when news reports came in of a devastating earthquake in Haiti. “The next morning I called Judy MacGrath at MTV,” says George Clooney. “She said, ‘We’re thinking about doing something, too. Let’s do it.’ By the time I flew back to L.A., the other networks had signed on. Every single network. At some point, it got to be you couldn’t be the network that didn’t.”

Clooney’s mission is to raise as much money as possible for the victims. “First and foremost, raise a lot of money,” says Clooney. “If we could pick up shovels and go, without being in the way, a lot of us would do that.”

“I think music a strong way to help people begin the healing process,” says Hope for Haiti producer Joel Gallen. “Artists have deep feelings that we all share. This is a way to express themselves through songs, many of which are doing songs they didn’t even write, and have never recorded. It’s a special performance of a song they love.”

“You’ll hear Jennifer Hudson singing a song you’ve never heard her sing before,” says Clooney. “John Legend is singing Mother and Child. It’s just beautiful. It will last longer than just the telethon. We will make a lot of money off of iTunes because we’ll have 18 songs.”

Hope for Haiti will take donations online and have a traditional phone bank that’s anything but typical. “It will be the biggest bank of faces you recognize answering phones,” says Clooney. “That will be streamed live on the web. If you call, you can get Daniel Day Lewis on the phone…about 130 or 140 actors and actresses, athletes, and singers and television hosts. They’re all coming up, not to be on the show, simply to answer phones.”

Hope for Haiti Now will air on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, BET, The CW, HBO, MTV, VH1, CMT, PBS, TNT, Showtime, COMEDY CENTRAL, Bravo, E! Entertainment, National Geographic Channel, Oxygen, G4, CENTRIC, Current TV, Fuse, MLB Network, EPIX, Palladia, SoapNet, Style, Discovery Health, Planet Green, CNN en Español, and HBO Latino. Canadian networks include CBC Television, CTV, Global Television, and MuchMusic. Hope for Haiti Now will air internationally on BET International, CNN International, National Geographic, and MTV Networks International, which is available in 640 million homes worldwide.

The event will be live streamed online globally across sites including YouTube, Hulu, MySpace, Fancast, AOL, MSN.com, Yahoo, Bing.com, BET.com, CNN.com, MTV.com, VH1.com and Rhapsody. On mobile phones it stream on Alltel, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and FloTV. Hope for Haiti Now will be available non-exclusively to all terrestrial radio stations around the globe and SIRIUS XM Radio as a one-time-only radio broadcast via the MTV Radio Network and Westwood One.

Performers for Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief include Beyoncé to perform in London, Madonna in New York City, and Haitian artist Emeline Michel in Los Angeles. Participants include:

• President Bill Clinton
• Ben Stiller
• Brad Pitt
• Chris Rock
• Clint Eastwood
• Denzel Washington
• Halle Berry
• Jon Stewart
• Julia Roberts
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Matt Damon
• Meryl Streep
• Morgan Freeman
• Nicole Kidman
• Robert Pattinson
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Tom Hanks
• Will Smith

The death toll in Haiti is estimated to be as high as 200,000, that would place the loss of life on the scale of the Asian Tsunami of 2004. That was eventually calculated as 227,898 lost by U.S. Geological Survey.