The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague (and freshly minted DECRA Fellow) Katharina Esau, whose interest is especially in patterns of polarisation within the media coverage of climate change. She begins by noting that polarisation remains a poorly defined concept, which includes notions of issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, value-based, and other forms of polarisation.
News media are usually perceived as polarised, too, but there is no robust way of assessing biases in and polarisation between different media outlets. This project, therefore, gathered data from some 26 Australian mainstream and fringe media outlets and manually coded more than 400 articles on climate change for the actors, positions, claims, justifications, emotions, and values represented in their coverage.
Political actors are highly prominent across the coverage of all outlets; business, advocacy, citizen, and academic actors are far less present, and much more unevenly represented across the various outlets. Specific key actors named are the Australian federal government, Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, other major politicians and parties, generic groups like activists, scientists, or business, and other countries like the US or China.
Articles addressing climate change address fossil fuels (with somewhat more opponents than supporters represented), nuclear energy (more support than opposition), and a variety of other themes. Distributions across fringe and mainstream media on the left and right also differ somewhat, but there is no strong sense of polarisation between these outlets.
Claims about the other side of the debate are prominent in such coverage, too: the others are often described as incompetent or inconsistent, as not doing enough, as being destructive or irresponsible, and as not listening to what ‘the people’ want, for example. Such claims and positions are justified in very different ways in different outlets: for example, The Guardian emphasises research and science, for instance, but the Herald Sun amplifies personal experience much more.
Overall, this does not indicate a relatively high issue or ideological polarisation in Australian media coverage of climate debates; perspectives diverge more on the kind of change that is needed, with emphasis on the energy mix rather than on debates about the existence of climate change as such. There is affective polarisation, however, as those with diverging views (especially if they are political actors) are frequently othered and dismissed out of hand.
