This article explores the patterns of political communication surrounding the environmental regulation of major Australian resource projects during the Business Advisory Forum of April 2012. The Forum discussed business and government responses to major project approvals to improve national productivity at a time when these projects also posed significant implications for anthropogenic global warming. The article’s method is to examine print news articles published during this period. While the international literature has long demonstrated how the American fossil fuel lobby has employed metaphor to characterise climate change as a ‘non-problem’—therefore allegedly making regulation of greenhouse gas emissions economically and politically unnecessary—no Australian study of metaphor use in climate science news has been conducted. This article, in finding news stories on so-called ‘green tape’ environmental regulation were saturated with metaphor clusters, argues that journalistic metaphor use has made the complex issue of environmental regulation accessible to mass audiences. But, in so doing, we also argue this metaphor use has supported business and government’s position on environmental deregulation of major projects. Finally, this article also argues that some journalists’ use of metaphors encouraged policy-makers to adopt, and re-use, journalists’ own language and, in so doing, allow those journalists to be seen as complicit in the shaping of softer public attitudes to the impact of major projects on anthropogenic climate change.
Over the last decade, several professionalising amateur Australian content creators making web series, distributed on multiple open platforms, broke into the television industry and developed promising careers. The limited scholarly research into the career trajectories and sustainability of web series creators has typically been conducted as normative critique of the value of web series labour. In contrast, we look processually and empirically at the career trajectories of 26 creators following their first publicly funded web series between 2011 and 2020. The creators’ pathways are varied, but web series facilitated a pathway to career sustainability for roughly three quarters of the cohort. Web series functioned as (1) a calling card for native online creators, (2) a format facilitating career consolidation or acceleration for television professionals and (3) a format enabling career diversification for filmmakers. Overall, they can be a market-tested talent training ground for television, especially broadcaster-video-on-demand or subscription-video-on-demand services.
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