Glenn Beck just won't toe the company line when it comes to Avatar director James Cameron and his environmental activism.

Following reports last week that Cameron signed on for two Avatar sequels with News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox after they made a “huge” donation to his environmental fund, Beck attacked Cameron and Google CEO Eric Schmidt for warning about the effects of global warming “left unchecked.” Cameron and Schmidt touched on the topic during a wide-ranging interview hosted by the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum.

Before airing the audio of Cameron and Schmidt, Beck said sarcastically, “And by the way, just keep laying down the money for his movies.”

Avatar, of course, is the highest grossing film of all time, and was incredibly profitable for News Corp. Presumably significantly more so than Beck's Fox News show.

The Deadline website reported last Wednesday that “James Cameron is telling Hollywood that Fox made a 'huge' donation to his environmental green fund, and in return he committed to making the Avatar sequel and threequel his next films.”

The following day, the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein reported: “As it turns out, the studio hasn't earmarked or contributed any money at all yet. Nor has the fund, known as the Avatar Foundation, been formally established. Fox has simply agreed that down the line it will help establish a nonprofit organization (co-funded with Cameron) dedicated to environmental issues, which will allow the 'Avatar' sequels to be viewed not just as Hollywood commerce but as good works toward the future of the planet.”

Whatever the details of the agreement, Fox executives' stance on Cameron's activism appears to have shifted following Avatar's success. In a February MTV interview, Cameron recounted the reaction of Fox executives when they first read the Avatar script: “When they read it, they sort of said, 'Can we take some of this tree-hugging, ”FernGully" crap out of this movie?' ... And I said, 'No, because that's why I'm making the film.' "

Goldstein also observed that the unusual deal Fox reportedly made with Cameron regarding his environmental fund “once again highlights the topsy-turvy inside politics at Rupert Murdoch's sprawling News Corp. empire”:

To say that the news made studio bosses uneasy would be an understatement. Movie studios have made donations to star's pet causes in the past, but as a perk, not as a prerequisite for a gigantic movie deal.

[...]

The most fascinating angle to this story, which has gone unnoticed in all the breathless blog posts about the “Avatar” sequel deal, is that it once again highlights the topsy-turvy inside politics at Rupert Murdoch's sprawling News Corp. empire. After all, Fox News and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, both owned by News Corp., have consistently scoffed at and taken issue with any scientific arguments that global warming is a looming threat to the planet. If I had a dollar for every WSJ op-ed page piece that mocked “An Inconvenient Truth,” I'd be almost as rich as Rupert Murdoch.

[...]

Murdoch's Fox News brand revolves around zealous conservatism, so it is allowed to push its right-wing agenda as much as it wants. But Murdoch's 20th Century Fox brand revolves around the rare creative abilities of filmmakers like Cameron, so if establishing an environmental fund helps give Fox two hugely commercial franchise films that could only be made by Cameron, then that wing of News Corp. will happily save as much as the rain forest as possible.

Don't tell this to Sean Hannity, but News Corp. has quietly gone green already. In the most recent rankings from the Carbon Disclosure Project, News Corp. ranked No. 1 in its sector and No. 2 in the U.S. overall for the transparency and rigor of its carbon footprint disclosure. It also received an A for its performance toward its goal. The company also has made a number of investments in solar power and wind energy businesses in recent years. I guess you could say that Murdoch is positioning himself so that, no matter how the debate over global warming is decided, he'll be on the winning side.

Indeed, things will really get interesting if the yet-to-be-established Avatar Foundation starts to take on those spreading misinformation about climate change -- News Corp. could end up funding a group that will point a finger directly at... Fox News.

From the November 1 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program: