Conspiracy theories can no longer be consigned to the fringes of media; they are a feature of news and journalism and can be defined as attempts to find causal explanations for events in covert plots rather than more prosaic processes. Often a pejorative label, journalists know that conspiracies can be sites for significant news-making. This empirical study explores the conditions and practices that lead to conspiracy theories entering news narratives. It focuses on the intense news coverage of a child sexual crime in Hobart, Tasmania that became a conspiracy theory involving the highest levels of government and the judiciary. It examines how Hobart's Mercury newspaper sourced its stories and finds that the conspiracy theory gained traction when official statements were deemed unsatisfactory and journalists sought other perspectives which enabled critics, including the newspaper, to attack the Tasmanian Government.
Since the 1970s, the Reef has been a site where Australian environmental policy has flourished, mirroring global environmental policy seeking to ‘balance’ human activity through ‘ecologically sustainable development’. The article examines the parallel and intersecting processes of modern environmental policy and news media practice in the context of the Reef to unveil how Australia's news media are communicating critical moments in the protection of the Reef. Through two key conservation moments – the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger – the article examines the role of news media in different geographic contexts, highlighting the complex politics of protection from early conservation campaigns to the contemporary era of protecting the Reef in the context of global environmental crisis. We identify how ecologically sustainable development discourses can be used to communicate positions that challenge and discredit policy initiatives aimed at protecting natural environments.
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