How some media shape regional Australia’s hostility to renewable energy
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Research traces how partisan outlets link climate-delay narratives, fossil-fuel interests and audiences, reshaping regional energy debates and public trust.
Across regional Australia, renewable energy developments have become sites of increasingly contentious political debate. While concerns about land use, environmental impacts and community consultation are often legitimate, opposition to these projects also operates within an information environment shaped by organised resistance to climate policy, concentrated media ownership, and transnational political networks.
Understanding this environment requires looking beyond individual instances of misinformation to examine how particular narratives are produced, legitimised, and circulated.
Climate scepticism cannot be explained simply as a failure of scientific communication. Ideological barriers to accepting climate science have been cultivated by influential actors seeking to undermine scientific consensus for personal gain. Decades of research have documented how fossil-fuel interests have created a professional ecosystem of political advocacy organisations, conservative think tanks and media corporations for this .[1][2]
In Australia, these relationships have been examined through research on corporate influence over climate policy , conservative political networks and the connections between fossil capital and neoliberal advocacy .[3][4][5]
As human-caused climate change has grown more and more incontrovertible, contemporary obstruction evolved to increasingly contest climate solutions rather than denying climate change itself. These discourses of climate delay , include arguments that overstate transition costs, promote continued fossil-fuel dependence, or defer action through speculative technological alternatives. Such narratives are also evident in mainstream television coverage internationally.[6][7]
This distinction is important because legitimate concerns about renewable infrastructure can be selectively amplified or reframed to suggest that climate action is economically destructive, technologically unworkable, or politically illegitimate.
News as social media
The circulation of climate delay narratives reflects a broader transformation in the relationship between journalism and political advocacy in an increasingly transnational digital information system. Hyperpartisan news organisations operate as platform-native political actors, producing content for recommendation systems, audience engagement and transnational distribution.
Rather than simply reporting on political controversies, these outlets interpret otherwise distinct disputes through a highly partisan lens, connecting them to recurring narratives of government overreach, institutional distrust, and opposition to progressive social and environmental policies.
News24, formerly Sky News Australia, exemplifies this convergence. As part of Murdoch’s media empire, News Corp, the outlet has a long history of producing and amplifying climate misinformation. Its substantial YouTube presence, combined with regional free-to-air distribution, enables political commentary to circulate between international digital audiences and Australian regional communities.
This creates a distinctive capacity to import narratives developed within overseas culture wars, adapt them to Australian political circumstances, and elevate local controversies into matters of wider ideological significance.
Our own research examined more than 114,000 videos and 51 million comments across Sky News Australia, Fox News, GB News and Rebel News, identifying substantial overlap between their commenting audiences. More than 56 percent of accounts commenting on Sky News Australia’s YouTube channel also commented on Fox News during the study period.[8]
This is the result of a strategy to target the highly profitable US audience, potentially facilitating the importation of US culture war narratives into regional Australia. While these findings do not establish direct persuasion or coordinated editorial activity, they demonstrate how ostensibly national news outlets participate in interconnected transnational political environments.[9]
These relationships are especially consequential for climate and energy debates. A dispute over a regional wind farm or transmission corridor can be situated within a much broader narrative about metropolitan elites, government incompetence, or the supposed failure of climate policy, which has been constructed over decades by a right-wing alternative information system heavily influenced by fossil fuel interests.
Conversely, controversies originating overseas can provide ready-made arguments, political identities and rhetorical strategies for interpreting Australian developments. Hyperpartisan news outlets are important vectors in both directions, translating local grievances into internationally recognisable political conflicts while supplying those conflicts with new examples and apparent evidence.
Communication surrounding the proposed World Heritage in danger listing of the Great Barrier Reef further illustrates this process, with research identifying connections between News Corp outlets, conservative think tanks, political actors and climate-sceptic online communities. As one example, commentary originating in The Australian was republished through advocacy organisations and international websites, extending its circulation beyond the newspaper’s original audience. The case demonstrates how established news organisations can supply narratives with journalistic credibility while interconnected political networks facilitate their wider distribution.[10]
Legitimacy of journalism
The significance of these networks extends beyond the circulation of misleading information. Research into climate obstruction documents how corporations, mediated through industry associations, think tanks and political actors, seek to influence public debate through interconnected advocacy and communication systems.[11]
Astroturfing is one expression of this process, disguising organised political interests as grassroots participation. Evidence from a study looking into decision-making during the 2025 federal election identified advertising practices that obscured connections between political campaigns, lobbyists and apparently independent community organisations.[12][13]
Hyperpartisan news outlets perform a related, although distinct, function. They can elevate local grievances into national political controversies, selectively reinforce narratives aligned with established commercial or ideological interests, and present these interpretations through the familiar conventions of journalism. News Corp plays a longstanding role in contesting climate science and policy , including its connections with conservative think tanks such as the IPA and fossil-fuel interests. Through this process, arguments favourable to fossil-fuel interests can acquire the apparent independence and authority of news coverage before being recirculated through political and social media networks.[14][15][16]
For regional Australia, these dynamics complicate an already difficult energy transition. Genuine concerns about land use, environmental impacts, and community benefits can be easily hijacked by a fossil-fuel dominated transnational information system.
Thus, transforming local disagreements into wider confrontations over political identity and institutional legitimacy, further delaying an appropriate, scientific response to human-caused climate change. Understanding and communicating who produces these narratives, how they travel, and whose interests they advance is therefore essential to protecting meaningful democratic participation in decisions about Australia’s energy future.
Klaus Groebner and Daniel Angus are with the Digital Media Research Centre, University of Queensland, Brisbane.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info .[17][18]