The trouble with ‘quiet advocacy’: local journalism and reporting climate change in rural and regional Australia

Abstract

Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit ‘quiet advocacy’ practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia.

Keywords

advocacy climate change common good local journalism quiet activism School Strikes 4 Climate

Introduction

Australia is a country facing the full force of climate change. Average temperatures on this southern continent have risen by 1.44°C since records began (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, 2020). In 2019/2020 Australia experienced an unprecedented (Boer et al., 2020) summer season of bushfires which incinerated a billion animals, devastated 12.6 million hectares of land, razed thousands of homes and killed 33 people (Werner and Lyons, 2020). This followed years of changed rainfall patterns and devastating drought – Australian droughts of the 21st century have been the most severe in 800 years (Freund et al., 2017). Rural communities in Australia are some of the populations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. While rural Australian communities are already experiencing climate change and will be increasingly impacted by its effects as change accelerates into the future, research suggests that rural Australia has been more resistant to media messages about climate change than metropolitan areas, with persistent division over whether changing weather patterns are indeed anthropogenic or due largely to natural causes (Austin et al., 2020).

In this context, considering how climate change is talked about and reported on in rural and regional Australia is crucial, yet there has been little scholarly focus on the role powerful mediators such as local newspapers play in reporting climate change (see Bowden et al., 2021 as an exception). Likewise, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways that regional and local media represent and give voice to young people involved in climate justice activism in rural and regional Australia. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. In 2018 and 2019, school aged students walked out of school globally and across Australia – including in many country areas – to protest against government inaction on climate change. The Australian student strikers were part of a protest movement variously known as Fridays for Future, Youth Strike for Climate or School Strike 4 Climate (Mayes and Hartup, 2021). School strikers across the world have called for leaders to take urgent action on climate change to ensure ‘a future’ for themselves and the world (Wahlström et al., 2019). They demand intergenerational justice for current and future generations who did the least to contribute to the climate crisis, but who will be most affected by its impacts (O’Shea Carre and Albrecht, 2018).

The 2018–2019 student climate strikes in Australia were met with polarised responses from politicians, media reporting and online pundits; with responses ranging from ‘enormous support and admiration’ to ‘vitriolic abuse’ (Bessant, 2021: 3). Young strikers were variously characterised, in Australian national media commentary as vulnerable to ‘the anxiety-producing mass hysteria of the Greta phenomenon’ (Shanahan, 2019), ‘yell[ing] inappropriate and violent comments’ (Beaini et al., 2019), as well as marked by ‘bravery’ and to be ‘congratulated [ . . . ] for standing up’ (in Gregory, 2019). While there has been some analysis of the representation of young people participating in the Australian climate strikes (Mayes and Hartup, 2021) and the roles and responses of schools as represented in media coverage (Mayes and Hartup, 2022), in this article we shift attention to journalistic reporting and journalists’ perspectives on reporting on climate change in regional and rural Australian towns.

Climate change communication research tells us that reporting on this wicked problem is best understood by audiences through local lenses (Scannell and Gifford, 2013). Both journalism and environmental communication scholars note that communicating the environment in the face of environmental crises calls for advocacy (Cox, 2007; Hackett et al., 2017). Local journalism (the kind that serves small towns and cities; see Örnebring et al., 2020) is an important area of inquiry in the broader sphere of mediatised communication, given local media are widely credited with playing an advocacy role, working actively for the betterment of the communities they serve. Little research has been done, however, on whether they are willing to be advocates for change on climate change in regional and rural Australia. We therefore examine in this paper if, to what extent, and in what ways local journalists working in regional and rural Australian towns feel able to use advocacy in their reporting on the School Strikes 4 Climate, and in the broader context of climate change-related reporting.

We begin with a discussion of the normative ideals underpinning journalism practice – objectivity, impartiality and commitment to serving a public sphere and political debate. We then unpack climate change journalism’s ethical orientation towards advocacy, drawing synergies between this thinking and the widely acknowledged advocacy role of local journalism. The empirical sections summarise the findings from a corpus media analysis by Mayes and Hartup (2021) that prompted interviews with selected regional journalists on their coverage of climate change during the school climate strikes. We then discuss the deep tensions between normative and advocacy journalism in relation to reporting on climate change in regional and rural Australia, examining how local journalists feel constrained in advocating on climate in their reporting work. We identify strategies that these journalists use to enact what we term ‘quiet advocacy’ in their climate change-related reporting, as opposed to the more overt, ‘louder’ advocacy practices local media is acknowledged for. We argue that these tensions and contradictions must be untangled if climate change is to be regarded in mediatised public discourse as the urgent issue it undoubtedly constitutes.

Journalistic norms and advocating for the climate

Journalism is revered for the role it plays in keeping the powerful accountable and providing information that helps people connect and deliberate about public affairs (Zelizer, 2013). Concepts of objectivity, accuracy and truth and the Habermasian idea of a ‘public sphere’ are at the core of a shared normative understanding of professional journalism. Objectivity is often articulated in a cluster of terms including ‘impartiality, neutrality, accuracy, fairness, honesty, commitment to the truth, depersonalisation and balance . . . reporting of news without bias or slant’ (Maras, 2013: 8). The notion of objectivity has been challenged by those who study media power and the role of journalists in shaping agendas and constructing reality rather than merely being observers (Couldry, 2012), nonetheless it remains an important strategic ritual and powerful doxic attitude that is rarely challenged by professional journalists practicing in mainstream media organisations (see e.g. Schultz, 2007).

In line with such normative ideas, journalists covering climate change have often sought ‘balance’ in their reporting, with significant implications for how media consumers understand the climate challenge. Boykoff and Boykoff (2004, 2007) famously identified ‘balance as bias’ in reporting on climate in US elite media, where climate ‘sceptic’ sources were given equal weighting with climate experts. More recent studies suggest that journalists are increasingly acknowledging scientific consensus in reporting climate, moving away from earlier ‘warmers versus deniers’ frames (Bohr, 2020; Brüggemann and Engesser, 2017). However, uncontested climate denier perspectives persist in journalism – particularly in opinion articles (Painter and Gavin, 2016) – and some media outlets serve as ‘sources and amplifiers’ of organised climate denial (Dunlap and Brulle, 2020: 49). Indeed, much journalism has arguably fallen vastly short of presenting the causes, scale, impacts, urgency and complexity of the climate challenge (Hackett et al., 2017).

Communicating climate change has recently dominated research in the ‘crisis discipline’ (Cox, 2007) of environmental communication (Comfort and Park, 2018). Such research now has a special urgency, given the acute need to communicate and act on cascading environmental harms, with much research attention directed at the role of journalism in reporting on the climate crisis (for a meta-analysis, see Schäfer and Schlichting, 2014). Journalistic work on climate change importantly shapes the ways that people ‘understand, talk, care and act around climate change’ (Gunster et al., 2018: 775). However, in a media landscape where many more voices and interests have joined the mediatised conversation on climate change, crucial questions have arisen about how journalism should be responding to climate emergency. What should it be doing to counter misinformation, reveal truth, encourage public engagement, hold decision makers to account and galvanise policy action? Such questions have been a subject of enquiry both for journalists reporting on climate change (e.g. Hertsgaard and Pope, 2021; Watts, 2020) and for media and environmental communication researchers (Hackett et al., 2017).

Recent research has endeavoured to establish what effective climate change journalism should look like. Hegemonic media’s focus on drama and threat, and its orientation towards the infighting of elite political actors on climate change, leaves audiences feeling powerless and disengaged (van der Linden et al., 2015). Conversely, reporting which underscores people’s agency to act can enhance audiences’ sense of self-efficacy in relation to taking action on climate (Loy et al., 2020). Reporting that investigates not just the problem, but solutions, can also better sustain audience engagement (Painter, 2019). Likewise, journalism that tells stories about local environments in relation to climate change can make a global story relevant in a local context (Scannell and Gifford, 2013).

Despite the long-held journalistic convention of objectivity, reporting in the context of environmental crisis may now call on journalists to take a different path. The study of environmental communication has long ascribed an ‘ethical duty’ to the field. Cox (2007) has written of the ‘responsibility’, in communicating the environment, to ‘identify and recommend practices that . . . enhance the ability of society to respond appropriately to environmental signals relevant to the well-being of both human civilization and natural biological systems’ (p. 16). Such advocacy has indeed been identified as an ‘important guiding concept’ for environmental journalism (Fahy, 2017). Other scholars have argued that ecological crisis is now leading to a transformation of journalism more broadly, a trend that Brüggemann et al. (2022) have described as ‘transformative journalisms’. For these authors, this involves ‘an explicit and transparent commitment to contribute to the social-ecological transformation of societies by doing journalism’. As the climate crisis accelerates, journalists themselves have called for journalism to treat climate change coverage differently. The Guardian’s global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, has appealed strongly for climate reporting to seek to ‘shape public opinion’ and ‘influence change’. ‘Business as usual is not enough’, he writes. ‘Nor is journalism as usual’ (Watts, 2020).

Local journalism’s ‘loud’ advocacy versus ‘quiet activism’

While local journalism adopts similar normative practices and approaches to mainstream news, it operates on a slightly different axis. There is extensive literature around the symbiosis between local journalism and ‘community’. Lowrey et al. (2008) defined community journalism as ‘intimate, caring and personal; it reflects the community and tells its stories’ (p. 276). There is a ‘closeness-to-community’ assumption that is difficult to quantify but is adopted by many professionals working in local news (see Bowd, 2011; Hess and Waller, 2017). Local news outlets, especially newspapers, have a strong tradition of taking leadership roles in the towns they serve, advocating and championing for change, progress and overall ‘betterment’ of the areas they represent (Hess and Waller, 2017). Such practices have traditionally been positioned as advocacy journalism, campaign journalism and champion journalism, defined as a news outlet’s willingness to campaign or advocate on behalf of a perceived collective on matters of public interest or a ‘common good’ (Hess, 2017).

Examples of local media advocating for an issue for ‘common good’ include advancing community infrastructure such as roads, hospitals and schools, to broader social justice issues such as homelessness or diversity. Hess and Waller (2017) argue that a key criterion for quality advocacy journalism is that the issue or position adopted should benefit a perceived ‘all’, not just elites and dominant groups. In this way, local journalism advocacy should serve and negotiate a shared benefit and associated moral and collective values (see especially Borden, 2010; Hess, 2017). While increasing public awareness of and promoting action on climate change is undoubtedly a cause for the common good, there has been little study of local reporting of climate change through an advocacy lens. Bowden et al. (2021) examined a local newspaper’s coverage of climate change adaptation and found that journalists advocated against an opportunity for climate adaptation, moving from advocacy on a common good cause and instead strengthening the hegemony of economic value and property rights. This highlights that advocacy journalism can adopt different positions that might not benefit all, and underscores how political economy factors including media ownership can influence a newspaper’s reporting on an issue.

Local media’s acknowledged overt advocacy practices can be contrasted with a more discreet, less vocal type of activism that research has identified at the local community level. ‘Quiet activism’ (Steele et al., 2021) is undertaken by those who lack (or do not desire) media power to instigate social change, but who seek to make change by enacting pro-environmental behaviours at an individual and collective level. Quiet activism describes small-scale, intimate social change efforts – beyond visible street protests, mass gatherings and resistance. Scholars of subaltern politics have long drawn attention to practices of ‘quiet encroachment’: ‘non-collective but prolonged direct action by individuals’ in a ‘quiet’ and ‘unassuming’ fashion (Bayat, 2000: 536). In relation to the climate emergency, quiet activism has been defined as local-scale ‘small, everyday’ acts undertaken by ordinary people, that are ‘either implicitly or explicitly political in nature’, and that ‘critique, subvert and rework dominant modes of production and consumption’ to address the climate emergency (Pottinger, 2017: 215). In what follows, we examine how local journalists’ accounts of their reporting on the climate strikes relate to local advocacy and quiet activism in the context of climate crisis.

Methodology and summary of media corpus analysis

The concerns of this paper were sparked during a corpus analysis study of newspaper and online newspaper articles covering the School Strikes 4 Climate in Australia between 1 August 2018 and 31 December 2019. A substantive account of the methodology and findings from this analysis is discussed elsewhere (Mayes and Hartup, 2021, 2022). In this article, we summarise regional and rural news sources in the corpus and foreground the thematic findings relating to regional and rural reporting, as a context for this small-scale interview study with purposively selected regional and rural journalists. This paper focuses on the interview accounts of five regional and rural journalists about their coverage of the strikes, and their perspectives on reporting climate change.

Articles for the corpus media analysis were sourced from Australian national media outlets (N = 2), state-based media from the states of New South Wales and Victoria (N = 8) and a sample of regional and rural media from the states of New South Wales and Victoria (N = 17), well as articles from Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News and The Guardian Australia (total news sources = 29). News sources were chosen to include a range of ownership and political orientations, and a geographic spread of sources based in metropolitan, regional and rural areas. Including newspapers in regional and rural areas (see Figure 1) recognises that the school strikes took place across multiple regional and rural sites in Australia, beyond the metropolitan centres which were predominantly featured in major newspapers’ accounts. The choices of regional and rural news sources aimed for geo-social diversity (Hess, 2013) – that is, to sample across geographic regions and regions with diverse demographic profiles. In using the term ‘geo-social’, we draw on Hess’ (2013) re-conceptualisation of the ‘local’ newspaper as ‘geo-social news’: these are ‘news outlets that have a solid link to geographical territory’ (p. 49). The search terms ‘student strike*’ OR ‘climate march*’ OR ‘climate strike*’ and later, ‘Australian Youth Climate Coalition’, ‘Fridays for Future’ and ‘Greta Thunberg’ were used (via NewsBank, Factiva and Gale OneFile databases). At each stage of the search, the corpus was refined to include only articles meeting the inclusion criteria (see Table 1). The corpus included news stories, feature articles, opinion pieces/commentaries and letters to the editor. In all, 500 articles met the inclusion criteria (see Mayes and Hartup, 2021 for details).

Figure 1.

Map of sampled regional and rural newspaper locations.

Table 1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

1. Subject matter of the article reports and/or discusses school student climate activism and schooling. While earlier searches included Greta Thunberg (for a sense of the discourses in circulation about her as a young climate activist), articles included for closer analysis needed to include discussion of the Australian school strikes.

2. Traditional print media (published online or available on online databases) – Television or radio news databases and social media excluded. However, print media descriptions and discussions of television and radio coverage and social media posts (e.g. Tweets) were included.

3. Published in Australian newspapers in English – With sampled regional newspapers from NSW and Victoria included.

4. Duplicated articles excluded.

During the initial analysis of the corpus, Mayes and Hartup noted that journalists at some regional and rural media outlets in the south-eastern Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria seemed to represent the school strikers in especially favourable ways. Regional and rural newspapers sometimes invited student organisers to author their own commentaries, and sometimes centred the voices of student organisers. For example, a newspaper in the small town of Gunnedah in regional New South Wales (The Daily Liberal) published three such commentaries by school students (26 March 2019; 6 May 2019; 20 September 2019). To give two examples of centring the strikers’ voices, one article in The Daily Advertiser (Horn, 2019b) draws on five sources: four students, and one politician. Similarly, another article in Ballarat’s The Courier, (‘Ballarat students are urging the community to join their climate protest next Friday’, Elg, 2019), foregrounds the voices of three student organisers as sources, and privileges their messages in the headline and opening line: ‘Students are calling on the community to march with them for climate action next week’. Ninety-three per cent of words in this article are quotations or reported speech from student sources (566 out of 609 words); the reporter’s voice is limited to introducing the sources.

In some regional newspapers, we noted how a particular student striker from the local community was selected, with the report giving biographical context for their activism, and sometimes drawing comparisons between the young striker and Greta Thunberg (see Mayes and Hartup, 2021 for further discussion). For example, the Shepparton News featured a particular student organiser, as well as the response of her ‘supportive’ school principal, who described her approvingly as ‘passionate’ (in Lewis, 2019). Citations of scientific evidence for climate change, and scientist sources, were also sometimes included in reporting on the climate strikes. One report in the Bendigo Advertiser (D’Agostino, 2018) included a lengthy quote from an IPCC report and two of its co-chairs, describing ‘extreme weather’ and explaining how ‘every extra bit of warming matters’, with increasing risk of ‘long-lasting or irreversible changes’ (D’Agostino, 2018). Reports on the strikes sometimes also incorporated local government debates and other local responses – for example, the local council’s vote to back the climate strike in the town of Mildura, reported in the Sunraysia Daily (Adcock, 2019), and the pledge of a farmer from the Riverina area to plant a tree for every protester, reported in The Daily Advertiser in the town of Wagga Wagga (Horn, 2019a).

This kind of coverage – apparently particularly attentive to the strikers’ concerns – led Mayes and Hartup to seek further understanding of the dynamics of journalistic representation of the young climate activists in these regional and rural areas, from the viewpoint of the journalists who covered the strikes. Working with Mocatta and Hess, we narrowed our analysis to the coverage of the school strikes in smaller regional and rural towns – that is, newspapers in areas with a population size of under 150,000 (14 newspapers included, three newspapers excluded; see Figure 1; excluded newspapers shown with strikethrough). We subjected articles from this subset of newspapers to qualitative content analysis for positive coverage of the school strikes in their geo-social contexts, re-reading 193 articles in total.

In this process, seven regional or rural newspapers were identified as having published positive articles on the strikes, closely attentive to the strikers’ voices and cause. ‘Positive’ articles were identified as those meeting two or more of the following criteria:

(1) Foregrounding young local people as sources and extensively including their voices, perspectives and demands in reporting the strikes (e.g. Elg, 8 March 2019);

(2) Quoting sources supportive of the local strikers’ actions (e.g. Lewis, 16 September 2019);

(3) Including scientific evidence on climate change supporting the strikers’ demands (e.g. D’Agostino, 2 November 2018);

(4) Including commentaries by local student strikers themselves (e.g. Burgemeister, 2019; Kater, 2019; Thomas, 2019);

(5) Discussing the strikes in relation to the local context (e.g. local government, local environmental/climate concerns) (e.g. Adcock, 30 August 2019; Horn, 28 September 2019).

Following this analysis of the subset of the media corpus, we invited journalists from these seven newspapers to be interviewed, and approached them via email, noting their relatively positive coverage. Five journalists consented and participated in interviews. These were two veteran male journalists and three younger female journalists, with experience ranging from 4 to 35 years. Though this is a small sample size, and not generalisable across all local journalists, we consider the themes raised and issues explored to gesture towards a ‘provocative generalisability’ – what critical scholar Fine (2006) explains as inviting readers to ‘launch from our findings to what might be, rather than only understanding (or naturalising) what is’ in terms of reporting on climate change (p. 100). While journalists gave permission for their names to be used in publication, due to the community sensitivities they articulated, we opted not to identify them by name in discussing their interview data – though at times we offer some further detail to situate their accounts in their local and demographic contexts. Further geo-social contextual details about these journalists’ newspapers and selected information about the newspapers’ climate strike coverage are given in Table 2.

Table 2.

Selected regional and rural newspapers and journalists.

Journalist (by number)	Years of experience as a journalist	Newspaper	Location (and population)	Circulation of newspaper/readership (monthly combined print and digital)	Owner of newspaper (ACM = Australian Country Media)	Political party in region * (ALP = Australian Labor Party)	Total number of pieces on the climate strikes (including articles, OpEds, letters published)	Total number of pieces authored by the interviewed journalist
Journalist 1	25+	Border Mail	Albury, NSW and Wodonga, VIC (combined population of these border towns) (97,717)	278,479	ACM	Albury – State: Liberal Federal: Liberal	29	4
Journalist 1	25+	Border Mail		278,479	ACM	Wodonga – State: Liberal Federal: Independent	29	4
Journalist 2	4	Bendigo Advertiser	Bendigo, VIC (100,991)	371,407	ACM	State: ALP Federal: ALP	32	8
Journalist 3	10	The Courier	Ballarat, VIC (101,588)	318,690	ACM	State: ALP Federal: ALP	18	5
Journalist 4	4	The Daily Advertiser	Wagga Wagga, NSW (56,442)	62,575	ACM	State: Independent Federal: National	27	7
Journalist 5	35	Shepparton News	Shepparton, VIC (51,631)	624,050	McPherson Media Group	State: Independent Federal: National	23	5

The Australian Labor Party is the country’s key left-leaning political party. The Liberal Party is the largest conservative, right-leaning party in Australia. The National Party is considered to be situated further to the right than the Liberal party and is often regarded as the party of country and rural Australia.

During interviews, journalists were asked about their personal context and length of employment at the media outlet (to gauge embeddedness in their communities), their personal views on climate change, their perspectives on their own coverage of the school strikes, their views on the role of journalists in reporting climate change and their views on their newspaper’s reporting on climate overall. We analysed interview material with a close reading of transcripts alongside the newspaper articles that each journalist had written during 2018–2019. We identified three key themes in journalists’ accounts of their behind-the-scenes work, worldviews and decision-making in relation to climate advocacy when covering the school climate strikes: questioning the appropriateness of climate advocacy, climate change as ‘too political’ and the role of ‘quiet advocacy’.

Findings

Local journalists question the appropriateness of climate advocacy

All the journalists we interviewed supported the ‘closer to community’ thesis (Hess and Waller, 2017) considered unique to local journalism, as distinct from metropolitan reporting. As one veteran reporter (Journalist 1) noted about working in a local context:

It’s a lot harder to be anonymous . . . and we’ve sort of got to have that feedback from people we will be bumping into in the supermarket. You can’t burn people perhaps as easily as you might think you can in the city where you might not meet that person ever again. There’s a closer connection in relation to how the community interacts with the paper, and the ownership of the paper, and what you do.

Each journalist could give clear and recent examples of how their regions had been affected by climate change, from water access issues, to devastating bushfires and floods. While a positive lens, favourable to the strikers, was identified in these journalists’ coverage of the strikes – as outlined in the section above – those interviewed seemed uncomfortable with this suggestion. For example, when asked whether they agreed that regional newspapers had covered the strikes and strikers favourably, Journalist 1 answered:

We probably . . . in terms of the coverage of the strikes, probably just . . . [have] taken a straight line in relation to just reporting them as events and what people say and then. . .leave the debate for web comments and letters to the editor, that sort of thing. I guess it’s still a hot topic.

Rather, these journalists tended to align their reporting with normative ideas of journalism, especially objectivity (Maras, 2013). Scholars such as Tuchman (1978) argue journalists use objectivity defensively as a strategic ritual. This became apparent in interviews for the current study. While journalists themselves were informed and concerned about climate change, they were eager to clarify that their personal views had not permeated their news coverage. When asked whether their personal views on climate change shaped their reporting of the strikes, Journalist 2 commented:

I guess with any news story your personal views and the way you see the world is always going to shape things but I’m quite conscious that it’s not my job to have personal views that colour what I do. So I have tried to remain as objective as possible on this particular issue.

Interviewees however acknowledged that advocacy journalism was an important practice for local news outlets, especially when it came to issues that were seen to benefit all in a community. As one reporter (Journalist 3) commented:

These people among the community, you’re closer to them somewhat I think. And people feel kind of like you’re their voice.

Journalist 1 stated that knowing what issues to advocate for was often based on a journalistic ‘gut feeling’ (see Schultz, 2007), rather than the result of conscious strategising by an editorial team. Journalist 1 agreed that journalists should lobby for change in the interests of all community members. This journalist gave the example of state border closures during COVID-19 as a recent issue where the newspaper had championed a particular cause:

It is probably more intuition and seeing each issue on its own and what role you can have as a paper. [The border] was sort of something that we campaigned to try and change. And that was something, I guess as a community issue, we sort of felt that we were at the forefront of.

Climate change was understood by all interviewees as a global and local challenge, however, prior to their relatively positive coverage of the climate strikes, they had not advocated for transformative action on climate change for the common good. Despite having 25 years of experience as a journalist, and experience with local advocacy, Journalist 1 did not believe climate change was the kind of issue that their newspaper could take a leadership role on:

I think we probably should have a stance on it, but it’s one of those things that’s – how much do you lead the community, versus how much the community leads you. So from that point of view, I think it’s the community leading the issue rather than us leading the issue.

In this way, the journalist pointed to the importance of community sentiment in shaping an advocacy agenda. Some of the journalists noted that there was still resistance in their regional or rural communities to accepting climate change as anthropogenic. One early career journalist (Journalist 4) who described themselves as a ‘passionate’ climate change activist, said that taking a leadership role on issues that might be divisive within the community was difficult. Again, upholding normative ideas of journalism was considered paramount:

I think we are also afraid of being called ‘biased’ or ‘copping the heat’, especially when you live in a smaller town where people know you, they know where you live. We are afraid of making enemies. And it’s pretty painful when you receive personal letters of attack.

This same reporter said they had considered how to build awareness around climate change but concluded that a bold media leadership campaign was not the best option in their geo-social context.

Climate change as ‘too political’

Although climate change is a matter of atmospheric physics, not politics, it has become sharply politicised in many national contexts – including in Australia (Holmes and Star, 2018). Recent research indicates, however, that young people under the age of 24 in Australia – precisely those marching on the streets during the climate strikes – have views on climate change that are less politically polarised than those of their parents’ generation (Tranter et al., 2020). In our interviews with journalists, the idea that climate change was ‘too political’ was nevertheless strong. Such politicisation seems to have significantly influenced the ways journalists felt about their role in reporting on the student strikes, and the extent to which they felt able to advocate for the position the local strikers were taking. Journalist 1 commented on ‘the left/right aspect’ of covering climate change-related issues, making it a politically ‘hot topic’. This meant that coverage of the climate strikes in this journalist’s newspaper, as mentioned, took a ‘straight line’ without much background or contextualisation.

Another journalist described readers’ ideologically motivated responses to coverage as a key consideration in the way their newspaper covered climate change and the climate strikes. Journalist 4 said that climate change was considered in their area a ‘left-wing’ issue, and as such, the paper was unlikely to take an advocacy position on it:

We live in a conservative area. You know the Goulburn Valley is a farming area, it’s represented by the [conservative] National Party. So the news . . . has to be reflective . . . it has to reflect the view of its peak of its readership . . . There’s probably a fair number of anti-green sentiments out there in the community.

As noted above, some journalists seem to wrestle with the perceived political dimensions of their personal views on climate change, versus advocating for this issue in way that could serve the common good of their community. As veteran Journalist 5 noted:

If we’re trying to tell the climate change story with too much . . . what’s the word, sort of anger, we’re not going to get a good response from our readers. So we’ve never taken a real hard line in our position on climate change, regardless of our personal views. And I’m conscious of that. My personal views are not the same probably as the vast majority of our readership.

Journalist 4 explained how the strikes were a lightning rod for existing polarisation in the community on climate change, and that they seemed to divide people in the surrounding area. This was manifested in opinions expressed in letters to the editor and in the efforts made by people who travelled from more distant towns for the protest. As this journalist put it, people ‘either loved what was happening or they hated it – and they wanted to be heard’.

Vehement polarisation on climate also became evident on social media sites during the school strikes. Research into climate change communication on social networks has repeatedly identified these networks’ capacity to magnify polarisation (Cann et al., 2021; Häussler, 2018). Journalists interviewed for this study confirmed that polarisation was evident in online commentary in the rural newspapers’ social media pages. For example, Journalist 4 related how the school strikes for climate story ‘blew up’ on the newspaper’s social media page, requiring close monitoring so that the newspaper’s online presence was not used as a platform for defamatory statements. This journalist spoke of ‘mud flinging’ and ‘name calling’ surrounding discussion of the local climate strikes online, noting that the polarised response to the strikes on the newspaper’s social media sites had even led to a change in company policy, so that now:

. . . if something is causing that much hate online we take it down; so that it doesn’t need to be monitored. But then we open ourselves up to people saying we are censoring them.

Another journalist (Journalist 2) noted how their newspaper’s coverage of the school strikes acted as a prompt for ‘climate deniers’ to start actively posting on their newspaper’s social media pages.

It is clear, then, that an additional key blocker to local journalists feeling able to take an advocacy role on the issue of climate change is existing polarised community sentiments – in which climate change is often aligned with party-political ideology – expressed online, in letters to the newspaper, and indeed, in the streets. This polarisation and uncivil conduct around the issue was intensified on social media.

‘Quiet advocacy’ in reporting climate change?

Despite feeling constrained by local entanglements, the journalists interviewed did think about avenues for advocacy on climate change in their work. In these interviews, they each described ways that they had enacted ‘engaged’ or ‘helpful’ journalism, if not more explicit advocacy journalism, ‘transformational’ journalism (Brüggemann et al., 2022) or ‘solutions journalism’ (Aitamurto and Varma, 2018). In this section we examine the opportunities for agency that local journalists perceived they had, and that they used in their coverage of the climate strikes and strikers, despite the constraints discussed above. We describe this work as ‘quiet advocacy’: a concept that extends but is distinct from the concept of quiet activism. While ‘quiet activism’ is used to describe conscious social change efforts that are small-scale and intimate resistances to the status quo, ‘quiet advocacy’ remains a more tacit practice that operates within and draws on the accepted logics of the news media field, especially at the local level we describe here.

One tactic that the journalists used was to foreground climate science in their work. In place of using their own voice for advocacy on the issue, they described presenting expert science on the global problem in a local context. Journalist 3 explained how they would always try to refer to scientists as sources:

What I think is really important is backing it up with scientific evidence . . . I think writing about it that way is really important: to show evidence and put it out there so people can understand it.

This journalist mentioned the need to read scientific research and have a good command of climate science facts to convince readers that ‘climate change is real, it is here, whether we like it or not, and it is an issue that we as a nation – the world – should be interested in’.

Additionally, two of the interviewed journalists described actively disallowing a platform for those who had denied or sought to downplay the seriousness of climate change, at least in the print editions of their newspapers. Journalist 3 commented it was ‘not very helpful’ to publish the views of ‘people who deny climate change’ – a tendency Journalist 5 described as a ‘probably a conscious choice’ by the newspaper’s editorial team. This strategy seems fairly obvious: journalism has broadly moved on from ‘balance as bias’ (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004, 2007) in reporting climate change. However, climate denialist views still are regularly given a platform in Australian mainstream media, particularly on commercial radio stations and TV channels like Sky News and Fox News. Keeping climate denialist views out of their newspapers therefore formed an act of resistance and a means of having some agency in reporting on climate for local and rural news.

Another tactic that the journalists described using when reporting on climate change was ‘calling out’ untruths uttered by key sources and diversifying sources to include young people. Journalist 4 described how during Australia’s catastrophic 2019/2020 bushfires, much misinformation circulated in the media in relation to the connection between the fires and climate change for example, stories based on deliberate misinformation social media posts that attributed the cause and extent of the fires to arson, not climate change (Mocatta and Hawley, 2020). As this journalist explained:

A lot of people were saying things that were not true; but they were official sources. They were politicians; they were public people. So we [journalists] felt the need to quote them and say, ‘Well, this is what they’re saying’. That’s just dangerous. I don’t think we should be doing that. . . . I think the main work of journalists is to be calling that out. I haven’t seen a whole lot of that. When somebody stands up and says something that is completely false – whether it is about the bushfires, climate change or COVID – I don’t think journalists are quick enough to say, ‘Actually, you’re wrong; and I am going to stop you there; and here’s how you’re wrong’. Because people need to know that.

This journalist recognised that holding those in positions of power accountable was a key normative tenet of journalism. This position also speaks to research on techniques for countering misinformation on climate change, particularly the possibility of ‘inoculating’ publics against mistruths by pointing out and correcting fallacies in discourse on climate change (see, e.g. Cook, 2022; van der Linden et al., 2017).

A key tactic related to calling out untruths of those in power was, as previously mentioned, to foreground students’ voices. Primary definer sources in news journalism are usually experts and voices of authority: those that ‘reproduce the definitions of the powerful’ (Hall et al., 1978: 57). Source choice is also one of the ways that journalists step away from objectivity in their work: no choice of sources is entirely objective and source choice necessarily embodies the journalist’s value judgement and opinion. As described above, in the media corpus of positive articles about the student strikes, we identified that journalists used the student strikers as sources much more frequently than they used traditional primary definers. In explaining why this happened, Journalist 2, a young journalist just a few years into their career, said:

I was very interested in what the young people who were protesting were doing because I believe it’s really important . . . The success that they’ve had in bringing the issue to a higher prominence and in keeping it in people’s minds and establishing just how much it means to their generation is incredible.

Journalist 2 also commented that their newspaper’s extensive coverage of the student strikes and strikers was intentionally to ‘amplify their voices’, and that by doing so, they hoped to:

give the community an opportunity to have the discussions that it needs to have, and to act and to make the change that’s going to enable this community to better weather whatever comes at it in the future.

Journalist 3 said that through their coverage of the strikes, they were proud be ‘playing [their] part’ in communicating the students’ message to the wider community; they hoped that their newspaper’s coverage of the strikes would ‘make some kind of a difference’ or help to enact ‘some kind of positive change’.

Foregrounding the students’ voices might be considered a less overt – but nevertheless meaningful – form of advocacy that stemmed from the journalists’ own views on climate, deployed intentionally in the interests of change-making. Journalist 4, like journalist 2, relatively young and just beginning a career in journalism, said they were passionate about climate change and making a difference in the community, however, they noted that any advocacy had to take a ‘gentle, gentle’ approach. Foregrounding students’ voices might therefore be considered as another way of assisting the ‘tactical operation’ (de Certeau, 1984) of the climate strike movement – through what we position here as ‘quiet advocacy’ in local climate change reporting.

Discussion

Our initial examination of media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate identified how some local newspapers adopted a consistent positive tone in stories about the strike actions, providing us with an entry point for seeking insights into how these local journalists understood their role in reporting climate change. In our conversations with journalists, however, we identified somewhat of a tension. We know that local journalists often advocate on issues for the common good of their communities, but when it came to advocacy on climate change, local journalists felt uncomfortable with being described as overt advocates in a professional context. This hesitation in relation to advocacy on climate change was expressed both by early career journalists as well as by more experienced reporters. This hesitancy therefore seemed not so much related to some journalists’ relative inexperience (which might be associated with a lack of confidence) or, conversely, extensive experience (which might be associated with entrenched normativity). Instead, all the journalists interviewed felt bound both by an allegiance to normative ideals of journalism and were sensitive to the divisive nature of the issue within their local communities. Climate change advocacy seemed to be considered more through a political than a moral lens of the common good. While helping communities better understand climate change and galvanise climate action is clearly a cause for the common good, journalists were reluctant to engage in overt advocacy practices and thought leadership on climate in their communities.

These findings have clear implications both for the practice of journalism, and for scholarship in the field. At a time when journalists are calling for change to long-held ways of doing journalism, when the academy is also noting transformative changes to journalism in the face of climate crisis, the pressure that the Australian local journalists we interviewed feel to not to ‘push’ climate change, and to deploy no more than a ‘covert’ kind of advocacy in reporting on climate protests, is concerning. Research in climate communication emphasises that telling the global story of climate change with local nuance is crucial to enhance communities’ understanding of the issue, and that understanding is a precursor for climate concern. Difficulty with having frank conversations about climate in local media in Australia – a part of the world on the front lines of the climate crisis – will hold back communities’ climate literacy. Given that most people get their information about climate change from the media, journalists’ reticence to report on climate change and advocate constructively for solutions leaves rural communities less informed and less prepared for action towards mitigation, as well as adaptation to the changes already locked in. As the research about misinformation that we have touched on briefly here notes, positive ‘inoculation’ with correct information about climate change is also important to counteract misinformation in broad media discourse. Misinformation has more opportunity to proliferate and be persuasive where relative silences on climate change exist. Local media outlets are important and influential information sources and advocates for their communities, but this research points to the limits of this advocacy. Our findings indicate that issue politicisation and local entanglements mean that this sphere of journalism is still resistant to journalistic ‘transformation’ in reporting the most pressing issue of our time.

In this context, instead of overt advocacy, we have detailed some of the tacit practices that the local journalists we interviewed employed to publish positive stories on the school strikes movement, and on climate change more broadly, in the face of the local constraints they perceived. We have described this work by journalists as ‘quiet advocacy’ on climate change: a moniker that brings together the concepts of advocacy in local journalism (Hess and Waller, 2017), the advocacy imperative of environmental communication (Cox, 2007), and recent critical geographic work on the concept of quiet activism (Steele et al., 2021). Without doubt, polarised local attitudes in some locations, newspaper positioning in the community, and the consequent constraints that small-town journalists feel subject to, make advocacy on the common good issue of attending to climate change difficult for them. Yet, while we acknowledge the value of quiet activism’s ‘small scale, everyday’ (Pottinger, 2017: 215) ‘modest acts’ (Steele et al., 2021: 18) and even ‘subversive strategies and tactics’ (Steele et al., 2021: 13), we question whether such modest action is enough for journalists in the face of the climate crisis.

Such ‘quiet advocacy’ journalism as we have identified, enacted in support of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural Australian towns, is a small step away from ‘business as usual’ journalism on climate. Yet, if the climate crisis compels journalists to seek to ‘shape public opinion’ and ‘influence change’, then such constrained ‘journalism as usual’ approaches are no longer ‘enough’ (Watts, 2020) – neither in metropolitan or indeed in local contexts. As Hertsgaard and Pope (2021) put it, in the face of climate change:

. . . journalists have a responsibility to make sure the public understands what’s at stake and . . . to hold powerful interests accountable for doing what’s needed to preserve a livable planet. That starts with telling the truth: about the climate emergency, its solutions, and how little time remains before it’s too late.

Our study indicates that local news media – so accustomed to ‘loudly’ advocating for the good of ‘community’ and discursively privileged to lead thought and action within such contexts – should be well suited to undertaking the kind of advocacy required in the face of the climate crisis. For local journalists, this could start with ‘telling the truth’ about climate impacts – current and future – on their local communities. It could also involve frank discussion of ‘what’s needed’ in local communities to mitigate and adapt. This task need not be up to individual journalists alone. Whole media organisations could usefully undertake such an initiative, sharing content with other local outlets in their group. Initiatives like the Covering Climate Now climate journalism project already do this: sharing stories and climate journalism expertise between organisations. Enhancing public understanding of climate science and preparation for shared threats may also assist in the vital task of depoliticising attitudes to climate change. As Nisbet (2019) notes, one of the priorities of climate crisis journalism should be ‘facilitating discussion that bridges entrenched tribal divisions’ (p. 26) of the kind we have noted here. But journalists, as Nisbet (2019) also writes, have pro-active responsibilities ‘to awaken’ to ‘inform’ and to ‘rouse’ people to action (p. 23). The trouble with the quiet advocacy on climate change in Australian local media is that it falls short of these crucial – even epoch-defining – responsibilities.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Ethics information

This research was reviewed by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee and was approved, with the ID number: 2020-126.

ORCID iD

Gabi Mocatta

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