The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on evidence use in polarised climate reporting. Climate news is highly polarised, and this mirrors broader polarisation in the news landscape. However, such polarisation is not always a problem – agitation for progress is entirely legitimate, for instance, and diverging views are a natural part of healthy political debate. However, this can turn to destructive polarisation.
The analysis of news polarisation is often focussed on polarisation amongst news audiences; the assessment of news content for evidence of polarisation is often a great deal more complicated. This also needs to take into account journalistic routines: what news is available, what news content journalists tend to focus on, and how such news is reported in day-to-day practice. In Australia, this is also complicated further by its extremely concentrated media market, with only a very small number of major news outlets dominating the market.
This project worked with news articles from some 22 Australian news outlets across the political spectrum, selecting some 450 articles across two constructed weeks, and manually coded these for justifications relating to support for or attacks on various energy technologies; such justifications could include research, science, law, expert opinions, and many more.
Such justifications are somewhat rare: they are present for no more than 50% of all claims in any one outlet, and often as low as 25%. The Guardian leads the field in providing justifications for claims; many of the Murdoch tabloids provide the least number of justifications for claims. Some energy types are supported or attacked with evidence much more than others; nuclear power, for instance, is often argued for by analogy more than through other justifications, while expert opinion is used especially frequently to support climate action.
Science is often invoked in a very non-specific way, with repeated claims; this can also differ very widely between supporting and opposing claims. Again, the pro-nuclear side argued largely from analogy and international comparisons, while the anti-nuclear side referenced expert opinion and scientific evidence much more strongly. There is also a kind of shame rhetoric, pointing out that other countries are using nuclear energy while Australia is not.
