The next instalment of our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online is now up. As always, we've posted a slightly longer version of the article on our group blog Gatewatching, in addition to the ABC article itself. Here's an excerpt:
Digging Deeper
By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns
Climate change dominated a couple of days of Federal Election campaigning earlier this week, with the major parties both fumbling in laying out their responses. Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull were punished by the mainstream media for, respectively, revealing something approximating a real opinion about how climate change agreements should work, and for being involved in a debate about Government policy before it's implemented.
Australia's bloggers have been more nuanced in their coverage of environmental challenges over a much longer period, and unlike the mainstream media, they have been able to carry out analyses and host conversations that reveal the range of community opinions on what kind of shape our environment is in, and what we can or ought to do to remedy it.
The mainstream media gave lots of space to Peter Garrett's "gaffe", and portrayed Malcolm Turnbull's cabinet room defeat on Kyoto as evidence of coalition "disunity" - devoting so much space to such celebrity politics that there wasn't much left over for any detailed analysis of either party's actual policies.
There also wasn't much room for the Greens or other minor parties to outline their approaches. Once again, though, as we've shown of other issues in previous Club Bloggery posts, the blogosphere - which is not hitched so tightly to the campaign caravan - has been better able to offer in-depth analysis, discussion and deliberation about climate change policy.
