'Together we can save the arctic': celebrity advocacy

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‘Together we can save the arctic’: celebrity advocacy and the Rio Earth Summit 2012 Alison Anderson a

a

School of Government, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK

To cite this article: Alison Anderson (2013) ‘Together we can save the arctic’: celebrity advocacy and the Rio Earth Summit 2012, Celebrity Studies, 4:3, 339-352, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2013.831617 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.831617

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Celebrity Studies, 2013 Vol. 4, No. 3, 339–352, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.831617

‘Together we can save the arctic’: celebrity advocacy and the Rio Earth Summit 2012 Alison Anderson*

Downloaded by [Univ of Plymouth], [Alison Anderson] at 05:47 30 October 2013

School of Government, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK (Received 16 December 2012; accepted 30 April 2013) Economic, institutional and organisational pressures mean that journalists have become increasingly reliant upon pre-packaged information, principally from public-relations professionals, industry and news agencies. Celebrities have become an important currency and particularly so with regard to climate change, since they can help propel the issues into the headlines. As environmental NGOs frequently find themselves at the whim of ever-shifting political and media agendas, celebrities can lever news entry, providing them with a powerful hook. This article examines the role of celebrities in the Rio+20 summit through a textual analysis of UK newspaper coverage, together with a review of recent surveys of celebrity influence on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. The Rio United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development was organised to take place on the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 summit. Compared with the earlier summit, it received very little media attention. Analysis suggests that celebrity involvement can be a potentially significant means of raising visibility of environmental issues through popular culture, but at the same time runs the risk that the core message becomes muted or challenged. Keywords: climate change; celebrity advocacy; media; Greenpeace; Rio+20 summit

Introduction The mass media can exert a potentially important influence on policy agendas and public attitudes to climate change (Wilson 1995, Boykoff and Boykoff 2007, Butler and Pidgeon 2009). However, in an increasingly image- and celebrity-driven culture, complex, drawnout environmental issues can also often fail to attract significant media attention. After COP15, the fifteenth session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, was held in Copenhagen in 2009, many news editors in Europe appeared to be suffering from ‘climate fatigue’ and climate summits were not considered especially newsworthy (Arévalo 2012). Indeed, research undertaken by the BBC suggested that there was generally low interest in the Copenhagen Summit amongst its viewers (Painter 2010). The expectations around the Rio+20 summit that was held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 were also low, particularly given that many world leaders (including David Cameron and Barack Obama) were absent. There were almost 4000 accredited journalists in attendance, compared with nearly 10,000 in 1992 (UN 1997, Fahn 2012). Relatively few media personnel were from Europe and, in contrast to the Rio summit of 1992, there was little representation from the main US television networks (Fahn 2012). Previous analysis of media reporting of climate *Email: [email protected] © 2013 Taylor & Francis


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summits suggests that they tend to oscillate between hope and despair, with the dominant framing tending to be one of failure (see Eide et al. 2010). Over recent decades, environmental NGOs have become increasingly media savvy, attested to by their increasingly sophisticated use of spectacle and symbolic imagery (Anderson 1997). At the same time, celebrities have become more and more elevated as authoritative and seemingly ‘authentic’ voices within a number of political debates, including those concerning environment and development issues (Boykoff 2011, Goodman and Barnes 2011). Social media and blogs have allowed for a proliferation of celebrity news and gossip and more interactive opportunities for audiences to engage with the stars. And there is some evidence to suggest that news has become ‘softer’ over time, with more human interest and celebrity-related content, particularly in the red-top newspapers (see Reinemann et al. 2011). Unsurprisingly, the highest volume of coverage of the Rio+20 summit was in the prestige newspapers (Anderson forthcoming). The UK tabloid, red-top, newspapers virtually ignored the Earth Summit, apart from some news-in-brief items on the Greenpeace Save the Arctic Campaign and the Climate Siren protest. It was clearly not considered a newsworthy story. This is despite a general increase in the level of environmental coverage in UK tabloids such as The Sun since the late 2000s (Boykoff 2008, Anderson 2009). This article focuses on how celebrity interventions impacted upon UK national press coverage of the Rio Earth Summit. To what extent did the Greenpeace Save the Arctic campaign and the Climate Siren protest – both of which used celebrities in their campaigns – generate favourable coverage during the summit and how did this vary for popular, mid-market and prestige newspapers? And what lessons can be drawn about the role of celebrities in drawing attention to climate issues? The rise of celebrities as authorised definers of climate change Up until the late 1980s, news-media coverage of climate change was dominated in the main by scientists as the principal news sources, and the issue was generally framed as a scientific one (Trumbo 1996, Carvalho 2007). While celebrity advocacy for the environment is clearly not a new development, in recent years celebrities have become a much more prominent non-state actor in Western societies, reflecting a growing synergy between the entertainment industry and politics in many liberal democracies (Brockington 2008, 2009, Huliaras and Tzifakis 2011, Wheeler 2011). The growing penetration of digital media and more interactive webs of communication, together with what we may call the tabloidisation of the news media, have also contributed to opening up new opportunities for a greater range of authorised definers of climate change to make their voices heard. A number of scholars have noted how celebrities increasingly appear as key spokespeople in the debate, providing a powerful news hook with a strong human interest component (for example, Lester 2006, Boykoff and Goodman 2009, Boykoff et al. 2009, Brockington 2009, Boykoff et al. 2010, Anderson 2011). Well-known celebrity figures may crystallise and glamorise issues that may otherwise be seen as relatively detached from people’s everyday lives as the new ‘intimate strangers’ (Schickel 1985, Marshall 1997, Evans and Hesmondhalgh 2005). More and more actors/actresses, sportspeople and musicians are taking part in climatechange campaigns, from Madonna’s climate-change lyrics in her single, Hey you – released to coincide with Live Earth – Coldplay, Radiohead and Global Cool (launched in January 2007 to increase awareness of global warming among young people), to MTV’s Switch campaign. Greenpeace has a growing list of celebrity support – see the Look to the Stars, the World of Celebrity Giving website, launched in 2006.1


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Boykoff and Goodman (2009) examined national press reporting of celebrities and climate change between 1987 and 2006 in Australia, Canada, the USA and the UK, and found a substantial growth in celebrity involvement in 2005 and 2006. Another study examining the role of the visual in UK national press coverage of climate change between January 2000 and the end of December 2006 found that celebrities were being increasingly featured as advocates for environmental issues in newspaper images (Smith and Joffe 2009). As Boykoff et al. (2009) observe, more and more actors/actresses, musicians, artists and sportspeople are taking part in climate-change campaigns. Brockington (2009) argues that the increase in celebrity activity linked to environmentalism reflects the increasing size and influence of environmental NGOs and philanthropic organisations, alongside the growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility. Since environmental groups are at the whim of rapidly shifting media and political agendas, celebrities often provide a useful means by which they are able to obtain news entry and at the same time the celebrity may enhance their own public image. The complexity of the issues and the drawn-out nature of the problems, combined with high levels of information saturation, means that environmental pressure groups are faced with considerable challenges to find new angles on climate change that will generate significant media interest. Consequently they often rely upon the creation of staged, PR-focused events to gain access to the news media. Celebrities provide a way in which they can tap into news values and potentially achieve a broader appeal base for campaigns by associating them with fashionable icons. Climate change is an extraordinarily complex subject to cover. News stories about the environment have to compete with show business and crime, as these are the staple diet of national newspapers (Anderson 1997). Journalists in the UK have become increasingly reliant upon pre-packaged information, principally from public-relations professionals, news agencies and industry (see Turner 2004, Davies 2009). A recent study examining UK domestic national news coverage over two sample periods in 2006 described the dependence on such material as ‘extensive’; almost half of all press stories reproduced at least some copy from the Press Association service, and agency stories themselves are known to be based on PR material. Moreover, almost a fifth of newspaper articles were found to be either totally or mainly taken from such material or from related activities (Lewis et al. 2008). Methods In this paper, the sample period examining the reporting of Rio+20 covers two particular cases of celebrity-linked environmental action that were planned to coincide with it: the Greenpeace homeless-bear stunt on 21 June 2012 (tied in with the release of a Greenpeace advertisement highlighting the plight of the Arctic Circle, backed by Radiohead and narrated by Jude Law), and the staged Climate Siren protest at Buckingham Palace, London, on 23 June 2012. Here we explore how different forms of celebrity endorsement impact on news coverage. The sample of newspaper items was retrieved from LexisNexis electronic archive using the Boolean search terms ‘Save the Arctic Campaign’, ‘Rio summit’ and ‘Rio+20’ during the date range 1 June–30 June 2012. This was considered wide enough to encompass items in the lead up to Rio+20 and cover the immediate aftermath. However, it should be noted that Greenpeace’s campaign extended well beyond this period of time. The sampled newspapers comprised the majority of the national daily and Sunday UK newspapers; the only newspapers that could not be retrieved from the LexisNexis database were The Financial Times and The Sun on Sunday. The sampled newspapers were: The Times and The Sunday Times; The Guardian and The Observer; The Daily Telegraph and

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The Sunday Telegraph; The Independent and The Independent on Sunday; i; Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday; Daily Express and Sunday Express; Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror; The Sun; Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday; and The People. The items sampled included news in brief, regular news articles, features, commentaries, editorials and letters to the editor. All duplicate articles were identified and discarded. The sub-samples relating to the Save the Arctic campaign and the Climate Siren Protest formed part of a wider study examining coverage of Rio+20 itself (see Anderson forthcoming). The search for items on the Save the Arctic campaign produced a total of 27 articles and the search for the Climate Siren Protest generated 13 articles. A timeline of key events in 2012 campaign includes the following: June 7: Greenpeace and the Yes Men’s fake Shell video on YouTube goes viral and they launch their spoof ‘Arctic Ready’ website, which also purported to be from Shell. June 17: Prince Charles says time is running out to take action on climate change in pre-recorded video address. June 20: Official start of Rio Summit (at same time article published in Nature Climate Change on engaging publics about climate change). June 21: Save the Arctic Campaign is launched at Rio+20 and Greenpeace’s ‘lost polar bears’ stunt takes place in major cities around the world. June 23: Climate Siren lock themselves to Buckingham Palace gates. September 17: Greenpeace credits itself with stopping Shell’s Arctic expansion as the company announce that they are postponing oil drilling until the following year. The Save the Arctic campaign Environmental groups as non-elite political challengers often face numerous hurdles in gaining news entry (Lester 2010). In the case of the Save the Arctic campaign, Greenpeace employed an integrated news strategy that combined targeting traditional media (through their celebrity-backed campaign and polar bear stunt) with online media (particularly through their digital satire of Shell, created in partnership with culture-jamming organisation the Yes Men). Since the late 1990s the Yes Men have been engaged in creating fake news events, which they term as ‘identity correction’, designed to create news hooks and foster a critique of corporate power structures in contemporary society (Russell 2011, p. 118). This is not the first time the Yes Men have been active in generating news interest in the lead-up to a climate-change summit. In September 2009, a day before a UN summit, they distributed a fake edition of The New York Post, which ran the headline ‘We’re Screwed’ and contained articles about the impact of climate change on New York and satirical eco-celebrity stories.2 However, as with the spoof event discussed here, this failed to generate significant news-media attention (Russell 2011). What is interesting in this particular case is the way that Greenpeace combined this approach, working from outside mainstream media institutions, with a more traditional strategy of garnering celebrity endorsement and using the symbol of the polar bear to draw attention to the threat to the Arctic. Of particular interest here is to examine how celebrity advocacy works as a form of environmental protest compared with digital satire. Stranded polar bears and melting glaciers have been identified as key visual symbols that people tend to associate with environmental degradation (Leiserowitz 2006, Doyle 2011). Environmental groups have a long history of using the polar bear as a charismatic icon in campaigns about climate change since the early 1990s. In both the UK and


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Canada, for example, Greenpeace campaigners have dressed up in polar-bear costumes as a way of attracting attention to complex issues through deploying a visual symbol that can have powerful emotional resonance (Slocum 2004). Activists dressed up in polar bear suits make what is often perceived to be an abstract and distant problem more immediate, and introduce an element of light-heartedness into political debate (Slocum 2004). Greenpeace’s polar bear stunt on 21 June 2012, which was timed to coincide with Rio+20, was part of a broader strategy involving digital satire of Shell oil company with a fake event followed up by a hoax website and press release – the biggest campaign yet to be mounted by the group. The first element to this strategy was to manufacture a scandal. Using Shell’s advertising slogan ‘Let’s Go’, Greenpeace and the Yes Men designed a tongue-in-cheek positive campaign for Arctic drilling. A fake gala party was organised at the Space Needle, Seattle, celebrating the launch of their Arctic expansion. Greenpeace brought in a large team of actors, and local energy leaders were invited to attend the event supposedly organised by Shell. The centrepiece was an ice sculpture that rested on a bath of cola besides a scale model of a drill rig. As the guest of honour turned on the drinks dispenser shaped like an oil rig, there was an uncontrolled blowout and black ‘oil’ spurted out over the crowd. The video of the fake press conference went viral. According to Greenpeace: Shell’s harried reps did their best to contain the unfolding PR disaster, but alas the footage somehow got out. The resulting video has been viewed over half a million times already, generated a dubstep remix and sparked an entirely new brand: #shellfail . . . For many hours yesterday this story was one of the biggest things on the internet, sparking a wave of speculation and sharing. New tactics like this can help get the issue of Arctic drilling to a global audience, and expose its absurd, illogical nature. Humanity’s finest scientists have discovered a major problem in the way we use and consume energy, but companies like Shell are acting as if global warming doesn’t exist. In fact, they’re exploiting it to get more oil. Ultimately, that’s the biggest swindle of all. (Turner 2012)

Following this up, they created an almost identical version of Shell’s own website called Arctic Ready. Here they included a parody of the popular game Angry Birds, which they named ‘Angry Bergs’. A fake Twitter feed from the Shell social media team, ShellisPrepared, was also created, which appeared to be trying to contain the negative advertisements from a social-media tool on their site. The parody video quickly hit the top spot on Reddit and the number-two spot on You Tube, with a half-million views in fewer than 24 hours. The Yes Lab sent out a hoax press release supposedly from Shell in order to generate additional media coverage, threatening anyone who reposted the video and attacking the new ArcticReady.com website (Greenpeace 2012a). A series of fake legal threats were sent to journalists and bloggers, warning that, ‘Shell is monitoring the spread of potentially defamatory material on the internet and reporters are advised to avoid publishing such material.’ (Robbins 2012). Some sections of the media in the USA were duped by the fake press release and reported the Shell private launch party as fact. Approximately 24 hours after the launch of the campaign Greenpeace and the Yes Men posted blogs and a video admitting their involvement, Greenpeace were accused by some of media manipulation (see Holiday 2012, Robbins 2012). However when many of those news outlets and blogs reported that it turned out to be a hoax, the campaign gained lots of additional page views, so it could be seen as having benefitted both parties. Shell took a low-key approach, clearly aware that a legal


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response would only have drawn more attention to it. The only sampled national UK newspaper to have covered the story during June was The Financial Times, which published an article entitled ‘How Shell was hijacked in ad hoax’ on 21 June, alongside a business blog and a further article titled ‘Shell set to gain Arctic drilling permits’ on 26 June. This strand of the campaign, then (which did not involve celebrity advocacy), failed to generate widespread coverage in the traditional press. By contrast, the second element to their strategy – the celebrity-backed Save the Arctic campaign launched by Greenpeace on 21 June 2012 at Rio+20 – resulted in more comprehensive coverage. A high-profile press conference was hosted by Kumi Naidoo (Greenpeace International Executive Director), Sir Richard Branson and actress Lucy Lawless, who was facing sentencing for her role in scaling Shell’s Arctic oil rig in February 2012. Heralded as one of their biggest campaigns yet, Greenpeace’s press release stated: Hollywood actors have joined forces with rock stars, environmentalists, polar explorers and business leaders to launch a bid for a global sanctuary in the Arctic. The campaigners are demanding that oil drilling and unsustainable fishing be banned in Arctic waters (Greenpeace 2012b).

Celebrities backing the campaign included Robert Redford, Paul McCartney, Penelope Cruz and bands such as Radiohead and One Direction. Names such as these were amongst the first one hundred to be written on an ‘Arctic scroll’, which was to be planted on the seabed at the North Pole, 4km beneath the ice and marked by a ‘flag of the future’. A dedicated website http://www.savethearctic.org/was developed, as well as Facebook and Twitter pages (#SavetheArctic). At the time of writing, 2.75 million people have signed up. ‘Homeless’ polar-bear puppets appeared wandering around in a number of major cities around the world on 21 June. The story appeared online at BBC News, with a report filed from Rio de Janeiro by its Environment Correspondent (see Black 2012), and was covered by ITV News (ITV 2012). However, as Figure 1 below shows, the celebrity-focused campaign was ignored by a number of national newspapers, including The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror and The Times.

Figure 1. Number of articles on Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic Campaign (between 1 June and 30 June 2012).

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The greatest coverage was in The Guardian, followed by The Independent, The Financial Times and i (see Figure 2 below). Of the daily national newspapers, The Star devoted the least amount of attention to the Rio+20 summit itself (see Anderson forthcoming). The newspaper ran one very brief story (36 words) accompanied by a graphic on the polar-bear stunt:


Mounted Household Cavalry stand to attention in Whitehall, central London, as a polar bear looks on. The fake creature is part of a Greenpeace Arctic Rising campaign to highlight threats to the region from oil drilling.

Alongside this, it published another very brief news item on the involvement of Paul McCartney in backing the Save the Arctic campaign. It made no reference at all to the Rio summit. Clearly, the politics of the summit was considered of little interest to its readership. Indeed, the dominance of celebrity-linked news across the spectrum of sampled newspapers is illustrated by the fact that all the articles on the Greenpeace Save the Arctic campaign in The Sun, Daily Mail, The Independent, i, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer mentioned the involvement of the stars. An analysis of visual material accompanying the news articles (derived from online newspaper archives) suggests that a wide variety of different images were used, not all of which featured celebrities. These ranged from images of real polar bears and fake polar bear puppets to photographs depicting deforestation and ice sheets. The celebrities featured in the images were musicians/bands Paul McCartney, Jarvis Cocker and One Direction, and actress Lucy Lawless. As will be discussed later on, images can play a powerful role in climate change communication and celebrity framing can potentially have important consequences (though not necessarily positive) for public engagement (O’Neill et al. 2013). In addition to attracting press attention, a major part of Greenpeace’s strategy was to promote the campaign through online digital media. They released a video, Vicious circle, narrated by actor John Hurt and with music from Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, to coincide with the Rio Earth Summit. Following this, a further video was released in July, A homeless bear in London, depicting a polar bear wandering around London

Figure 2. Number of words on Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic Campaign (between 1 June and 30 June 2012).

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lost in an unfamiliar habitat, with voiceovers from Jude Law and accompanying music from Radiohead (Owens 2012). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 4XpF04nximI The campaign heavily boosted funds, which have reached at least £90,000 (Cole 2012). According to Oakley (2012) it generated considerable news media coverage:


Save the Arctic is off to a flying start – an endless list of celebrity endorsements, an announcement at the Rio+20 global conference on sustainable development and a nice PR stunt involving a polar bear wandering the streets of London have secured a huge amount of media coverage. Google count 1630 results when searching ‘Greenpeace Save the Arctic’ in the news application, including a grouping of a whopping 275 related articles.

However the present study, focusing solely on UK national newspaper coverage of the Save the Arctic campaign in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the Rio+20 summit, suggests that it had relatively little exposure, since it only generated a total of 27 articles. This “flying start” to the campaign involved the strategic use of celebrities to generate coverage as much as provide input into Rio+20. The lack of depth, and the focus on personalities rather than issues, particularly in the popular, mass-circulation newspapers, can be read as ‘perpetuating rather than confronting existing power asymmetries and inequalities’ (Boykoff et al. 2010, p. 5). Yet it attracted considerably more attention than a protest event that relied upon unofficial celebrity endorsement, to which we turn to examine next.

The Climate Siren protest The planned act of civil disobedience in London by Climate Siren, with the aim of conspicuously highlighting the consequences of climate change at the time of the Rio+20 summit, was first reported by The Guardian on 13 June 2012. The action, which took place on 23 June 2012, a day after the Rio talks concluded, involved four protestors who chained themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace. Two of them carried a banner with a quote from Prince Charles stating, ‘The doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight. We are simply not reacting quickly enough.’ They also published an open letter to the Queen on their website.3 According to the group, they were ‘demanding 10% annual emissions cuts (in the UK) and using Prince Charles’s own words to back up their demand. All four activists wore T-shirts with the message “CLIMATE EMERGENCY 10% annual emissions cuts”.’4 The stunt attracted national media attention and was reported by BBC News and ITN, as well as many regional newspapers. As Figure 3 below shows, all of the sampled prestige newspapers covered it apart from The Independent, i and The Times. The Sunday Times carried a news-in-brief piece the following day. Daily Star Sunday briefly reported on the protest but it only made one reference to Rio+20 in its entire coverage over the period of study, and this was very brief, with little information on what it was about or what it hoped to achieve. Many newspapers covered the story from a protest paradigm perspective, emphasising that ‘police were on the scene’. The Sun referred to the activists as an ‘Eco mob’, whilst The Daily Telegraph referred to them as the ‘Climate Change Four’. This news story, then, involving as it did the Royal Family and protesters chaining themselves to railings, was considered of limited newsworthiness but did not provide the opportunity to examine the outcome of the Rio talks in any depth. Prince Charles was unofficially co-opted to the cause in a form of unsolicited celebrity involvement. Environmental groups may use members of the Royal Family as a hook to garner media interest (for example, see Anderson et al. 2005). The Royal Family, as a form

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of ‘ascribed celebrity’ (Rojek 2001, 2012) 5 may give a story added news value. The images that accompanied these news stories centred on police officers, the protestors scaling the gates of Buckingham Palace and banners displaying the quote from Prince Charles. Framed through a protest paradigm involving a handful of demonstrators, their cause was presented as a fringe concern lacking in legitimacy. It is questionable as to whether the unofficial cooption of Prince Charles was a useful tool in this campaign; it may have led to greater coverage but it did not add any credibility. If the aim of the protest was to demand a 10% cut in emissions in the UK, it did not achieve its goals, despite gaining media exposure.

Discussion and concluding comments The above discussion sheds light on the contradictory ways in which celebrity and corporate brands are utilised by environment groups but also parodied and mocked. Through fake advertising campaigns, press releases and websites, environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace are symbolically contesting dominant economic interests yet at the same time embracing celebrity culture in an attempt to gain a greater voice. Of the three elements of the Greenpeace campaign, it was the celebrity-endorsement one that gained the most widespread media attention. As Boykoff and Goodman (2009, p. 149) observe: It is important to ask, can these ‘celebrity effects’ inspire and foster grassroots, democratic movements and responses to climate change by and for ‘the people’, or are they plutocratic, unique and extra-ordinary elite behaviours of distraction that work to build up the celebrity environmental ‘brand’?

While some may dismiss celebrity advocacy as a deception and distraction (for example, Weiskel 2005), without the involvement of celebrities in the Save the Arctic campaign, Rio+20 likely would have generated even less newspaper coverage, and perhaps no mention at all in some red-top newspapers. However, we need to caution against overplaying the influence of news-media coverage of celebrity advocacy. It is hard to empirically substantiate the claim that celebrity endorsement of a cause is a prime factor in encouraging or discouraging political activism, though it is frequently simply assumed to be the case (Marsh et al. 2010). Previous research suggests that celebrity endorsements may

Figure 3. Number of articles on Climate Siren protest.


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lead to increased levels of agreement with a political statement. Young people’s political opinions may be especially susceptible to being influenced and this is particularly the case where they hold in common similar demographic and ideological characteristics with the stars (Jackson and Darrow 2005). Meaning transfer theory suggests that familiarity, similarity and likeability between the celebrity and the young person are likely to exert a positive effect. Also, some research has found that musicians are especially likely to influence young people’s political attitudes (Veer et al. 2010). Celebrity endorsements, however, do not automatically translate into wider cultural acceptance of political messages (Anderson 2011). As Lester (2010, p. 161) observes, ‘Clearly, more work is needed to understand the complexities of connections and flows between celebrity, political engagement and news’. There is limited evidence to suggest, for example, that celebrity intervention in connection with the Live 8 Concerts in 2005 led to any significant change in the G8 commitment to Africa, and even less that it resulted in additional aid (see Marsh et al. 2010). The well-documented failure of Live Earth suggests that celebrity endorsement of complex environmental issues such as climate change may distance citizen action through the commodifying practices of celebrity culture. Live Earth may have generated greater visibility for the issues, but it appears to have had very limited impact on political engagement. Celebrity interventions can make issues more visible in the short term but, as Thrall et al. (2008) argue, they often play more of a mobilising role than stimulating a sea change in public opinion. They are a double-edged sword; under certain circumstances they can bring significant benefits, drawing wider public attention to environmental issues, but under other conditions they can hinder deeper awareness (Littler 2008, Hawkins 2011). As Goodman and Barnes (2011, p. 78–79) observe: ‘Celebrities are now the cultural intermediaries, along with NGOs and charities, who encourage us to care about Others, Other environments and Other places.’ They have become the authorised voices that speak on behalf of indigenous people, such as those that inhabit the Arctic. Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign reached its target of £100,000 in donations and there is no doubt that celebrities can raise huge sums of money for specific causes (Goodman and Barnes 2011). However, there are significant doubts as to their ability to further awareness of environmental issues in the long term. A recent study examined the impact of different visual representations of climate change (including images of celebrities) drawn from a sample of national newspaper coverage during 2010 in the UK, US and Australia (see O’Neill et al. 2013). Using Q methodology, the researchers interviewed participants in a workshop in each of the three countries as they sorted through 40 randomly numbered, postcard-sized laminated images and ranked them according to the extent to which they made them feel that climate change was important, and the extent to which the image made them feel they could do something about climate change. The findings suggest that the involvement of celebrities in climate-change campaigns does little to increase issue salience – the degree to which people think that the issues are personally important. Images of well-known figures – including Prince Charles, Bob Geldof and Richard Branson – were largely viewed in cynical terms and evoked fairly strong feelings that climate change was unimportant: ‘Whilst some participants found these public figures inspiring, far more found them guilty of “greenwash”, or simply deemed their contributions ineffectual.’ (O’Neill et al. 2013). These images of prominent personalities appeared to have little impact on people’s feelings about whether they could do something about climate change in the UK and US. However, the Australian participants exhibited strong feelings of disempowerment when presented with pictures of politicians and celebrities, perhaps reflecting the highly politicised nature of the climate debate in Australia. By contrast, images depicting climate-change impacts


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(including a picture of a polar bear and an ice sheet) appeared to be much more effective in promoting issue salience for participants in all three countries. These were seen to connect more strongly to personal experience of unusual weather. Yet these same geographically distant images were found to be the least successful of all the visual representations in terms of efficacy (in other words, eliciting a response that made people feel they were empowered to do something about climate change). A climate-protest image was much more likely to evoke feelings that participants could make a difference, but at the same time images of politicians tended to actively disengage people. However, as discussed above, the Climate Siren demonstration in the present study was framed as lacking in legitimacy and support. The most efficacious images were those of energy futures (for example, solar panels, home insulation, electric cars) or individual mitigative actions, yet O’Neill (2012) found that fewer than 7% of images attached to newspaper articles about climate change featured adaptive or mitigative solutions. Despite celebrities becoming increasingly framed in a light that makes them more accessible, Platt and Retallack (2009) conclude that more locally well-known individuals that ordinary people can relate to are more likely to be effective in deepening awareness than high-profile pop- or film-star celebrities. Moreover, the involvement of celebrities may serve to soften the message; it may become muted, part of a consumer package or brand, or become framed in such a way that its core legitimacy is questioned. As Meyer and Gamson (1995, p.188) argue, ‘Celebrities bring with them significant incentives to shift movement frames and in particular to depoliticise or deradicalise movement claims. Participation by celebrities, then, can speed up the process by institutionalising or domesticating dissent.’ Whether this tends to promote more consensual politics depends, to some extent, on the choice of the individual celebrity and on the medium that is used to convey the message. There is the risk that celebrity interventions may trivialise the issues. While the involvement of celebrities in environmental campaigns may heighten the visibility of a cause, then, publicity should not be viewed as an end in itself. The real issue is how demands become framed, the extent to which nonelite challenger groups are able to maintain control of the news agenda and the degree to which celebrities promote issue salience and efficacy.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

http://www.looktothestars.org/charity/greenpeace. See: http://nypost-se.com/. See: http://climatesiren.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/open-letter-to-her-majesty-the-queen/. http://climatesiren.wordpress.com/actions/buckinghampalace/. ‘Ascribed celebrity’ refers to an individual who gains celebrity status through lineage and bloodline, rather than through personal achievement.

References Anderson, A., 1997. Media, culture and the environment. London: Routledge. Anderson, A., et al., 2005. The framing of nanotechnologies in the British newspaper press. Science communication, 27 (2), 200–220. Anderson, A., 2009. Media politics and climate change: towards a new research agenda. Sociology compass, 3 (2), 166–182. Anderson, A., 2011. Sources, media and modes of climate change communication: the role of celebrities. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change, 2 (4), 535–546. Anderson, A., 2014 - forthcoming. Media, environment and the network society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.


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