Media Republic: Murdoch media fights actress Cate Blanchett’s green ads

Cate Blanchett's carbon tax ad

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman? Both are relatively successful Australian actresses. What could it be?

Well, Nicole is allowed to make advertisements to convince you to buy stuff. She has fronted campaigns internationally on TV, newspapers, magazines and cinema for Chanel, Nintendo, Schweppes and Omega watches.

At times the coverage of her commercials has been universal. In recent weeks there have been glossy ads in British and Irish newspaper magazines promoting her role as a “brand ambassador” for Omega’s Ladymatic range of watches. As far I can divine, being a brand ambassador just means looking serious in glamorous clothing with the products you are an ambassador for also in the shot.

Cate Blanchett, on the other hand, has appeared in a TV advertisement in Australia asking voters to support a carbon tax. The reaction to Blanchett’s ad has been significant for the amount of venom and anger towards her and environmental campaigners in Australia.

For example, Andrew Bolt, a columnist writing in The Herald Sun, a Murdoch News Corp paper, said:

If the science on global warming is so good, why are we told such lies?

That is the true disgrace of those behind the ad that features Cate Blanchett telling us to ‘say yes’ to the Gillard Government's carbon dioxide tax [and] it stars a multi-millionaire actor blithely instructing the little people to pay a tax that she wouldn't even feel herself.

Tim Blair, writing in another Australian Murdoch paper, the Telegraph, describes Blanchett as “the multimillionaire actress now fronting pro-government ads urging ordinary people to pay more taxes”.

140 public figures in Australia have signed a joint statement supporting the carbon tax, which Blair describes as being “a case of the unelectable leading the unrepresentative towards the impossible”.

In Britain, there has been considerable comment on the Blanchett ad with articles in The Guardian, The Independent and many other news sites. ‘Political’ ads on broadcast media are prohibited in Ireland and Britain so the case doesn’t arise here but it is interesting that neither Kidman nor Blanchet’s commercial advertisements ever get censured but one political ad can cause a storm.

Blanchett is also a “brand ambassador” for Audi cars, and this has been raised in a lot of the comment as Audi, like most car manufacturers, use quite a lot of fossil fuels – and that is even before you put petrol or diesel into them.

Maybe the lesson here is firstly the two-sided nature of the commercial news media. In Britain and Ireland, BSkyB, another Murdoch business, markets itself as being carbon neutral, a company idea that hasn’t got to its Australian affiliates or indeed Fox News in the USA.

Secondly, maybe we need less ads, more real news.