Charity appears to be the new black among celebrities, or so suggests the cover story in this week’s edition—the “Money Issue”—of The New York Times Magazine. On the cover are actress Natalie Portman and Martha Villaseñor Antunez, a Mexican businesswoman Portman supports through her pet philanthropy, microfinancing. (Portman works with FINCA International to give poor populations worldwide access to credit.)

The article chronicles celebrity charity from trendsetters like Oprah and Bono, to those better known for antiwar diatribes like George Clooney, down to smaller fries like NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, as these folks clue in to (a) the actual need or (b) the fact that it takes a feat to get attention in the 24/7 modern milieu of celebrity life—or (c) a combo of both. The Times story is one of several lately to remark on the trend.

“Most celebrities no longer have charities; they have causes,” the story says. A publicist in the article adds that celebrities now need “something for People magazine to shoot . . . You can’t just get $20 million a picture; you’ve got to serve turkey to the poor, too.” In the age of TMZ and Perez Hilton, the E! Channel and swarming paparazzi, stars stand out through public action. They “have to do something with all that attention.” As Portman tells the Times, “If they’re going to follow me around and take pictures, I’d rather talk about [microfinancing] than what dress I’m wearing or who I’m dating or whatever nonsense people care about.”

One of the biggest celebrity newsmakers of 2008 is Oprah Winfrey, for hosting “The Big Give”—her primetime reality-game-show event on ABC in which contestants give away large lump sums of cash. More than 15 million Americas tuned in the first week. (The $300 million Oprah has given to charity makes her America’s most generous black celebrity in history, according to Business Week.)

Actress Drew Barrymore also appeared last week on—what else?—“Oprah” to donate $1 million to the U.N.’s World Food Program, which had recently announced that skyrocketing energy costs and spiked consumer demand in developing countries brought commodity prices up by 40 percent in half a year. Talking about how “this has changed my life,” Barrymore noted her seven-figure donation is by far the largest she’s ever made. “Nothing,” she admitted, “has ever felt so good.” In January, Bill Gates, who will trade Microsoft for full-time philanthropy by July, began advocating market forces (what he calls “creative capitalism”) to alleviate poverty. For a while, there were even reports that Paris Hilton was planning to tour Rwanda once she got out of jail. The Red Cross and Oxfam now both employ celebrity-outreach directors to get more of them involved.

Hollywood’s philanthropy fad, while hardly representative of a majority of actors in west L.A., much less Americans, does make for an interesting contrast next to the giving patterns in U.S. churches, which were once the nation’s font for charity but now seem to be moving the opposite direction of Hollywood as they report bottom-scraping lows for giving. The average church member now gives 2.6 percent of his income, yet the (growing) yearly disposable income of just the nation’s 100 million evangelicals tops out at $850 billion.

Author Ronald Sider points out that if less than 1 percent of this amount went to provide microloans, it would raise the standard of living for the world’s poorest 1 billion people by 50 percent in one year.

Has Bill Gates poured $8.5 billion into programs that are doing just as much harm as good? LA Times questions whether the money Gates has devoted to global health causes is well-spent.

Critics say that Gates is funding much-needed vaccines and AIDS pills, but diverting attention from the true killers: poverty, ignorance, hunger, and poor hygiene. Patients may receive free AIDS pills from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, but the patients vomit them up because they are starving. Mothers may owe their lives to the pills, but their infants are dying in filthy hospitals for lack of a $35 oxygen tube.

LA Times poses three concerns. First, the Global Fund has diverted staff from basic health care, replacing well-trained clinicians with inferior staff. In Rwanda, for instance, the Global Fund pays its nurses $175 to $200 a month, while other nurses earn $50 to $100 a month. A Lesotho government official said the problem could be solved by taking a fraction of Global Fund’s funding to fund pay raises for other government health pay professionals.

Second, the focus on a few high-profile diseases has diverted attention from nutrition and transportation. The clinics are there, but some patients have to walk nine hours to reach them. One nurse told Times that four out of her five patients ate fewer than three meals a day, and most of them were dying of hunger as well as AIDS.

Finally, programs actually tell caregivers to ignore the possibility of other diseases. During vaccination drives, program directors tell caregivers that addressing other health concerns slows the vaccination lines.

Global Fund director Michel Kazatchkine said the Global Fund “cannot resolve all the problems of all the people.” The Global Fund has given 1% of its funds to helping local health systems, but it adds that its task is treating AIDS, TB, and malaria, not propping up local health systems. To take over would weaken African countries that need to learn to support themselves.