Is MTV Being Hypocritical?

Green bloggers everywhere are raving about the network's latest ad in the Switch campaign, where a funny little monster points out the hypocrisy of corporations that paint their products green and call them ecofriendly. But is MTV one of them?

I'm happy to praise the video for bringing the issue of green-washing to the forefront in a memorable and humorous way. It's great to point out that we don't have to be green to be green, especially in a confusing market awash with supposedly ecofriendly choices.

Around the same time that bloggers began to praise the video, though, a different report came out about MTV's environmental habits. The network promoted the last season of the Real World as green by building a house with sustainable wood and solar panels, but apparently that effort doesn't carry over to other shows. Reports are coming off the set of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge that the producers destroyed a swath of rain forest for the shoot. TMZ has photos of the wreckage of the set, which Michael Drake of the Tree Climber's Coalition said was littered with garbage and scripts for the reality series. "I have seen the aftermath of a tornado, and this was almost as bad," he said in his eyewitness report.

So is the network one of the corporations it warns consumers to be wary of in its own campaign? Or will the publicity and benefit from the public-service announcement outweigh the harm done in Panama? You can see the video here: