When a visionary like Rupert Murdoch speaks we need to listen…very carefully. From owning a small newspaper in Australia he now owns and heads one of the top media companies in the world. Now, he announces that News Corp has acknowledged the risks in Climate Change and wants to tackle it head on.

Rupert Murdoch gave a speech a couple of years back on how the media landscape has changed and how the audiences are different from before. He saw the trend, accepted the challenge and then, he bought MySpace.com. From nowehere, he owned one of the most popular sites in the world and making more money then he coughed up for the company with a single advertising deal with Google. As he says, he took a small risk and re-invented themselves.

Now, Climate change is similar for News Corp. Going carbon neutral is good. Cutting down energy is good. But Rupert realises that he can make a bigger difference. For good or bad, he has had a strong influence on his large media network across the world. Now, that influence may make a big difference.

In his speech he spells out the potential:

But becoming carbon neutral is only the beginning. The climate problem will not be solved by one company reducing its emissions to zero, and it won’t be solved by one government acting alone.
The climate problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe.

And that’s where we come in.

We’re starting with our own carbon footprint. Not nothing. But much of what we’re doing is already, or soon will be, little more than the standard way of doing business.

Our audience’s carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours… That’s the carbon footprint we want to conquer. We cannot do it with gimmicks. We need to reach them in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content– make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.Imagine if we succeed in inspiring our audiences to reduce their own impacts on climate change by just one percent. That would be like turning the State of California off for almost two months.

And imagine if… we were able to take on the carbon footprint of our audience in Asia. Many of the most serious impacts of climate change will be felt there, and China and India’s emissions are rising rapidly. STAR is the number one Hindi-language network in the world. In India alone, we reach 100 million people.

The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

For too long, the threats of climate change have been presented as doom and gloom– because the consequences are so serious.

We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

The biggest challenge that I have seen with Climate Change and other sustainability issues is the marketing. Changing people’s behaviour is a herculean task. We have to wait and see how this strategy actually gets implemented but the signs are positive.

The real message in the speech is this: The unique potential– and duty– of a media company are to help its audiences connect to the issues that define our time.