The Great Barrier Reef: News media,policy and the politics of protection

Introduction

The natural values of the Great Barrier Reef (the Reef) are obvious to the world. For some, these values are closely associated with the global tourism industry; for others, they are synonymous with dire predictions of worldwide ecological collapse. For more than half a century, the construction of the Reef as both a holiday paradise and a dying ecosystem – caught between the awe of nature and its fragility – has been a story of the contest between exploitation and protection (Clare, 1971; Foxwell-Norton and Lester, 2017; Hutton and Connors, 1999; McCalman, 2013; Wright, 2014 [1977]). The emerging recognition of the Reef as a site of global environmental importance is also the story of the development of modern environmental policy in Australia (Bowen and Bowen, 2002) and elsewhere (Beem, 2009). In this article, ‘environmental protection policy’ refers to the statutory mechanisms in place to protect the environment from the negative effects of human activities and exploitation. Such mechanisms have been developed in Australia and elsewhere largely through the concept of ecologically sustainable development (ESD) (Tarlock, 2009). Environmental policy and its representation in the public sphere by news media are critical to the explanation and justification of protection measures for the Reef and other environments, and to the boundaries of legitimate public debate defined therein.

This article explores the role of news media in communicating environmental protection policy. Building on recent theorizing surrounding mediatized conflicts, and particularly mediatized environmental conflict (Hutchins and Lester, 2015), we focus on two protection policy moments: the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger. For each policy moment, we collected news content from four Australian newspapers: two regional dailies, which service communities alongside the Reef, The Cairns Post and The Gladstone Observer; one statewide Queensland newspaper, The Courier-Mail; and one national newspaper, The Australian. This study of media's role in Reef protection provides empirical evidence of the network of relations that has defined Reef policy and conflict for more than 50 years. Our findings resonate with other studies of environmental conflict and news media (Cottle, 2006; Hansen and Cox, 2015; Lester, 2010; Lester and Hutchins, 2013). By drawing on global policy trends and salient features of international news media, we contribute to this literature by identifying how ESD discourses can be used to communicate positions that challenge and discredit policy initiatives aimed at protecting natural environments.

Principal in our identification of global environmental policy trends is ESD, a concept that emerged from key environmental gatherings in the early 1970s. The concept was an important element of the United Nations (UN)-Sponsored Stockholm Earth Summit in 1972 and came closer to its current definition with the publication of the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, 1980). It is a central feature of the influential Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987: 54), which defines sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

From these influential fora, the concept of ESD implied recognition of the need to consider the relationship between the ‘culture of development’ and the ‘nature of our environments’ (Foxwell-Norton, 2018) and this concept was affirmed and reified at the 2012 UNESCO World Conference on Sustainable Development (the Rio+20 Conference). In 2015, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was published, establishing global poverty as the greatest challenge to humanity and setting goals that are ‘integrated and indivisible and [that] balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental’ (United Nations, 2015: 4). The development of ESD coincided with the shift in environmental contest from political protest to political deliberation on policy through the 1990s (Lester, 2010). After decades of disparate groups of concerned activists, scientists and others calling for better stewardship of our natural environment, the world's governments finally appeared to be acting by implementing policies, such as ESD, in response to calls to respond to our emerging understanding of anthropogenic environmental harm. The success or failure of ESD is not at issue here; rather, the observation that in this period, ESD was instituted as the policy foundation of modern environmentalism in Australia and internationally (Dovers, 2013).

Concurrently with the evolution of ESD came a host of other international policy interventions that were notable for their concern with mitigating the impacts of industrial capitalism, especially air and water pollution. One of these was the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the World Heritage Convention). Established at the 1972 Paris UNESCO Conference, the Convention (UNESCO, 1972) delivered an international mechanism for the protection of global natural and cultural sites and was created to ensure international responsibility for the protection of sites deemed to be of ‘outstanding universal value’ (UNESCO, 1972). A ‘heritage list’ had been very much a part of the proceedings of the UN-Sponsored Stockholm Earth Summit in 1972, where ESD was also courted (see Cameron and Rössler, 2016: 11) and where the modern environmental policy agenda of ‘protection’ was established (Dovers, 2013).

From the 1960s onwards, there was a significant shift in the orientation of environmental policy from ‘governing the conditions of exploitation’ to ‘protection from exploitation’, as a consequence of the growing environmental consciousness and activism that were characteristic of the period (Lester, 2010). This global movement to protect the natural environment had local reverberations, including the Australian Government's establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act 1975, which was a response to a long battle to save the Reef from mineral exploration and mining led by environmental activists and organizations (Bowen and Bowen, 2002; Clare, 1971; Wright, 2014 [1977]). As the site of one of the world's first environmental campaigns, the Reef's history of environmental protection provides an excellent opportunity to observe the shifting logics and stakeholder relations that determine national and international environmental policy. Within that space, news media play a significant role.

The policy era described here was also marked by the extraordinary growth and extending reach of the global communications industry, which coincided with the rise of an environmental ethic that changed the role and capacity of news media to communicate our environment and associated conflict. The well-known ‘Earthrise’ image sent back by the 1968 Apollo 8 mission was heralded as both a remarkable ‘communications moment’ and a pivotal point in the modern environmental movement (Cosgrove, 1984; Lester, 2010). Environmental policy is regarded as an important public policy issue in many nations, and the role of media and news media in the communication of environmental issues is well rehearsed (see Hansen and Cox, 2015), and this is especially notable with regard to protest movements (Cottle and Lester, 2011) and global environmental crises such as climate change (Boycoff, 2011). This article takes a different tact and investigates news media reporting on official announcements relating to environmental protection policy as defined by the global adoption of ESD.

Mediatized environmental conflict and policy-making

To investigate how Australia's news media are communicating critical moments in the protection of the Reef, we employ Hutchins and Lester's (2015) concept of mediatized environmental conflict. This approach incorporates the complex role of media as an actor in social change, described within the idea of ‘mediatized conflict’ (Cottle, 2006). The concept of ‘mediatization’ describes the contemporary role of media in politics by recognizing that social, cultural and institutional settings are becoming increasingly subject to far-reaching media processes and logics (Cottle, 2006; Couldry, 2008; Hutchins and Lester, 2015). Mediatization research goes beyond well-rehearsed ideas of ‘representation’ (Lester, 2016) with Cottle (2006: 9) defining ‘mediatization’ as a concept that seeks to:

deliberately capture something of the more complex, active and performative ways that the media are used in conflicts today. The media are capable of enacting and performing conflicts as well as reporting and representing them; that is to say, they are actively ‘doing something’ over and above disseminating ideas, images and information.

Hutchins and Lester (2015) apply these ideas to contemporary environmental communication practices in their theory of the enactment of mediatized environmental conflict, which they define as ‘a product of the mutually constitutive interactions between activism, journalism, formal politics, and industry’ (p. 339). Acknowledging that modern environmental conflicts are largely sites of claim and counterclaim, in which news media play a significant but changing role, Hutchins and Lester (2015) consider how media practices and technologies act as agents in the structure of environmental conflict. In this context, news media are constitutive and performative in defining environments, issues and conflict and, importantly, in communicating legitimate actions, responses and responsibility for action, adaptation and mitigation (Lester, 2016).

Drawing on almost a decade of targeted empirical data and experience concerning Australia's Tasmanian Wilderness, Hutchins and Lester (2015) note that four pillars – activists’ strategies and campaigns, journalistic practices and news reporting, formal politics and decision-making processes, and industry activities and trade – coalesce to enact moments of environmental conflict. The collision of two or more of these pillars is identified as ‘switching points’ to describe ‘the spaces and sites where interlocking networks of media, political, and economic power meet and where environmental conflict is enacted’ (p. 339). At these moments, power shifts in environmental conflict and debate to favour or not, stakeholders.

Hutchins and Lester (2015: 342) argue that environmental conflict coalesces around two broad conflicting perspectives on the environment: an eco-centred ethics that seeks respect and harmony with nature; and, in contrast, the industrial and commercial perspectives of market economics. The conflict between these two world views has much philosophical and historical precedent, drawn from the critique that industrial capitalism contributes disproportionately to environmental pollution, degradation and crises (Beck, 1995, 1998; Beck et al., 1994; Dryzek, 2013). These perspectives also summarize the ambition of ESD and environmental policy to balance these two conflicting goals of protecting ecological systems while continuing to support industrial development.

In this article, we situate mediatized environmental conflict as often associated with significant moments of environmental policy and legislative processes. Our environments increasingly are the subject of political deliberation and governance, and we argue that these moments are performed, enacted, constituted and circumscribed largely by the influential environmental policy discourses of ESD. Within these conflicts, environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs), governments, industry and citizens – the four pillars of mediatized environmental conflict identified by Hutchins and Lester (2015) – become embroiled in contested claims and, importantly, those with an interest in influencing policy outcomes do so by attempting to influence the way news media frame policy stories and conflict (Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer, 2010; McCallum and Waller, 2013; Schön and Rein, 1994: 4).

What can or cannot happen on the Reef (aside from nature's own limitations) and other places is determined largely by the policy and law of prevailing governments, across international, national and local jurisdictions, and the myriad techniques of environmental administration that enable and limit legitimate knowledges and actions (Agrawal, 2005; Darier, 1999; Rutherford, 1994, 1999). ESD, as the environmental policy staple of the modern era, is key to understanding and defining Reef conflict and the protection of the Reef. Between the listing of the Reef as a World Heritage site in 1981 and threats to place it on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012, radical social, environmental and technological change occurred, altering the way environmental conflict in this sphere is enacted today. In order to explore the effects of these changes, we investigate two specific policy moments in greater depth:

Methodology

This article analyses newspaper coverage of these two key policy moments by interrogating the interplay of activism, journalism, formal politics and industry during these two moments in Australian environmental protection policy. The policy moments here are, in some part, the culmination of many ‘switching points’ where power has shifted in response to being strategically interrupted or disturbed by unexpected events, such as natural disasters and industrial accidents. At such moments, announcements from various parties, including government, are enacted by news media in a way that not only informs public understanding about policy but also defines the implications for stakeholders, including government, ENGOs and industry. Through the selection of news sources and frames, media shape information, and ‘voices, ideas and symbols gain or lose salience and resonance within public debate’ (Lester, 2016).

To examine news coverage, we selected four newspapers: The Australian – Australia's only national broadsheet; The Courier-Mail – the only state-based newspaper of Queensland, the state which borders the Reef; The Cairns Post – a regional newspaper that covers the northern regions of the Reef; and The Gladstone Observer – a regional newspaper that covers the southern region of the Reef. All of these newspapers are currently owned directly by, or through subsidiary companies of, News Corp Australia. This weighting towards one proprietor is unavoidable because the majority of Australia's mainstream newspapers are owned by News Corp Australia.

We collected 125 texts from the four newspapers for 2 weeks following key announcements: the 1981 data begins with the Australian Government's announcement of the inclusion of Reef on the World Heritage List on 26 October and the 2012 data begins 2 June with news reports anticipating the release of ‘the UNESCO report’.

Texts included news reports, letters to the editor, opinion pieces and editorials, but not advertising. Analysis of media, including letters to the editor and similar non-journalistic comment, such as editorials, is an established practice (Perrin and Vaisey, 2008). These time periods were selected because they represent the culmination and climax of environmental conflict in the policy realm. Specifically, these moments bookend the announcement of additional international governance and policy administration of the Reef through the being added to World Heritage list in 1981 and the threat of it being removed in 2012.

Mapping the various sources that frame a debate is an important feature in any nuanced analysis of news coverage, and sources are also central to work on mediatized conflict (Cottle, 2008; Hutchins and Lester, 2015). Hutchins and Lester's (2015) theory of the enactment of mediatized conflict clearly identifies three broad source categories – governments, industry and activists – to be examined in terms of their intersections with media. In our coding of sources, we followed these broad categories and developed specific subcategories of these to enable a more detailed investigation of the network of relations specific to our case study. These were International (mostly UNESCO); Political (government members and spokespeople of local, state and federal governments); Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organizations); Science (scientists and those who speak on behalf of scientific organizations and authorities); ENGOs; Industry; and Other (mostly individuals, such as local residents).

While sources provide the ‘who’ of news media representation of protection policy, framing provides the ‘how’ of communication by directing attention to the ways in which news media ‘promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’ (Entman, 1993: 52). We applied a frame analysis (Iyengar, 1991; McCombs et al., 1997) using a critical discourse approach (Fairclough, 1995). This approach highlights links between the use of language and particular social, cultural and political contexts and seeks an explanation for ‘the links between texts and social relations, distribution of power, and dominant values and ideas’ (Carvalho, 2008; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005: 1461; Van Dijk, 2000).

Our study sought to identify the different ways in which Reef protection policy was discussed in the selected newspapers in order to observe the ‘switching points’ at play. Both authors developed the coding schedule through reading a sample of the texts and frames and deductively drawing frames from both the headlines and the body of the text. We identified 13 frames used to contextualize the commentary and put them into groups (see Table 1). For the purposes of this article, we focus on the frames that appeared in the headlines because headlines serve as both labels for frames (McCombs and Ghanem, 2003: 74) and provide prominence and importance to these particular frames (Van Dijk, 1991). Further, headlines are written by editorial staff, and thus reflect the social and political perspectives of the newspaper (Trimble and Sampert, 2004). While most headlines engaged with the policy issue, the category for other captured frames that did not fall under the other categories.

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Table 1.

Coding schedule for frames.

Group	Frame
Support protection	Extraction is negative
	Protection is positive
	Needs protection
Oppose protection	Protection is negative
	Environmental threats are exaggerated/ policy is ‘green tape’
Balance	Industry and protection can coexist
Business	Local business (tourism/fishing)
	Extract is positive
Political	State versus commonwealth sovereignty
	Political debate about Reef without explicit reference to policy
Other	Comments unrelated to protection
	Research unrelated to protection

The golden standards of reliable coding are stability, accuracy and reproducibility (Krippendorff, 2004). In this study, reliability was addressed by both authors developing the coding schedule and pretesting during the deductive phrase of developing the schedule to ensure the protocol could be applied reliably (Riffe et al., 2014: 113). Having a relatively small sample size and a single researcher undertake the coding in a relatively short time span that was less than a month further ensured reliability (Riffe et al., 2014: 108). Although limiting coding to one person creates its own challenges (Campbell et al., 2013), our decision to have one coder removed concerns about intercoder reliability which requires that two or more equally capable coders operating in isolation from each other selecting the same code for the same unit of text (Krippendorff, 2004: 217).

Mediatizing the Reef over time

Four striking trends are apparent in our analysis: first, the Reef's protection has increasingly become a feature of Australian news, especially in the national and state papers; second, this coverage is marked by the dominance of political and industry sources; third, there is a striking absence of scientists, ENGOs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups as news sources; and, finally, there has been a significant increase in the framing of ‘protection’ as negative or undesirable between 1981 and 2012.

More voices talking about the Reef

Sources in this period, and the dominance of political sources in particular, reflect the extent to which nascent concern for environmental protection shifted to the recognition of political responsibility for governance. In the context of protecting the Reef, shifting governance from state to Commonwealth jurisdiction, and addressing the absence and ambiguity in policy and legislation, were first identified in the early campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s and Reef governance continued to play a central role into the 1980s as the Queensland state government, led by conservative Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, continued to resist Commonwealth assertions of primacy regarding sovereignty over the sea adjacent to Queensland's coast (see Bowen and Bowen, 2002: 363–368).

The politicization of the Reef in 1981 can be seen by the extent to which political actors dominate compared with the perspectives of scientists and environmentalists (see Figure 2). OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Total newspaper reports used in study.

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Figure 2.

Sources in news reports in 1981. ENGOs: environmental non-government organizations.

The dominance of the political realm in 1981 also reflects the extent to which nascent national and international policy towards environmental protection was generally regarded as newsworthy. There was considerable coverage of the 1981 World Heritage Listing in The Gladstone Observer compared with other papers. In its reporting, the dominance of political sources reflected an ongoing tension between the state and federal governments to establish economic authority over the Reef, particularly with regard to oil exploration. In this period, the conservative state government favoured oil drilling on the Reef, in direct opposition to a socially progressive federal Labor government (Bowen and Bowen, 2002: 321). As well as this federal–state debate, The Observer's coverage focused on the potential limitations of tourist and resort development proposals on nearby Curtis Island.

By 2012, news sources had shifted noticeably. There were more texts in the 2012 collection – 50 in 1981 and 75 in 2012 – and certainly more voices. As in 1981, political actors continued to dominate, but industry voices were second to political voices in the state and regional dailies. Industry perspectives on policy debates about responsibility for Reef protection and health were more visible in 2012.

A marked shift is evident regarding sources between 1981 and 2012 (Figures 2 and 3). Despite the announcement of the Reef's listing as a World Heritage property in 1981, there was little comment from international sources in any of the publications except The Gladstone Observer. Notably, science-based authorities received more coverage than industry, the views of which were curiously absent from both The Australian and The Courier-Mail. In 2012, political sources continued to dominate, but sources from industry were noticeably more present, which suggests the extent to which industry assumed strategies of media visibility during a time when environmental concern and political debate about the protection of the Reef was understood in terms of being threatened by industrial development. ENGOs were also dwarfed by industry sources, which and were particularly prominent in the regional newspapers of Cairns and Gladstone. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Sources in news reports in 2012. ENGOs: environmental non-government organizations.

Given the emergence of environmental policies premised on protection and ESD, we were particularly interested to explore the tension between the protection of the Reef versus the support for industrial development. In 1981, the privileging of editorial support for the Reef was not offset by suggestions that development and protection could coexist. By 2012, however, ESD was more entrenched in global environmental policy and a more familiar discourse within wider discourses about protecting the environment. At the same time, the extent of environmental crises was increasingly being argued, and varyingly accepted, as a responsibility for all governments and thus, a matter of policy development not protest. In the Australian context, the dominance of the mining industries and proposed expansions to exploration fields were identified as threats to both the Reef and global carbon budgets (Hoegh-Guldberg, 2015), so we were curious to see which voices were contesting the consensus of 1981 that protection was overwhelming positive. Given the rise in the number of industry voices in 2012, we looked more closely at which industries were being represented by industry sources. In this breakdown, fishing includes both recreational and commercial fishers; tourism includes tourists and tourism operators; and, finally, mining includes the coal, gas and oil industries (see Figure 4). OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Industry sources breakdown in 2012.

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Figure 5.

Protection frames breakdown in 1981.

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Figure 6.

Protection frames breakdown in 2012.

Overall, the fishing and mining industries equally dominated the representation of industry in 2012, closely followed by tourism. The Australian notably privileged mining, whereas The Courier-Mail slightly privileged tourism. The Cairns Post favoured the fishers, followed by tourism. The fishing sector in the Cairns region is closely associated with the tourism industry – for example, the tourism industry on the Reef includes fishing charters – and we anticipated that sources from the fishing industry would, at times, represent tourism. However, in the news texts collected for this study, the fishing industry sources voiced the interests of commercial and recreational fishers only and thus distanced themselves from any association with tourism. In this paper, fishers voiced opposition to protection policy of expanding marine parks while tourism voices were heard talking about the Reef more generally, such as tourism experiences on the Reef. The Observer had the least stories in 2012, and these predominantly covered mining, with no mention of tourism.

Overall, the increasing presence of sources from industry in news coverage points to a growing legitimacy of the perspectives of industry in debates about environmental protection between the events investigated here. But what were these voices saying? Further investigation of these protection moments reveals a shift in the framing of the Reef protection between 1981 and 2012 from news discourses that predominantly supported the idea of ‘protecting the environment’ to news that presented environmental protection as undesirable or, at least, to be balanced with development.

Discussion: Enacting mediatized protection

The comparison of the Australian media's enactment of ‘protection’ of the Reef between 1981 and 2012 is stark. The former represents a moment in time when protection was viewed as a positive goal and the latter is indicative of the extent to which vested interests can challenge and discombobulate the impetus to protect our natural environment. The data presented here suggest that news media, through their selection and privileging of sources and pro-development perspectives, have shifted from supporting protection to representing the merit and importance of protection as contingent on other factors, including massive industrial activity.

This finding indicates the extent to which discourses about the intrinsic value of the environment and the importance and desirability of protecting our natural world are being overshadowed and confused by contested frames that support business interests or present protecting the environment as a negative outcome for human well-being. Of particular note, the presence of the ‘balance’ frame in the national and state newspapers appears indicative of the influence of ESD policy on the parameters of legitimacy and authority in public debates and discussion of the Reef's protection. Taken as a whole, the inclusion of an ESD perspective does not serve to provide nuance in the development of protection policy but, rather, it serves to undermine the merits for, and momentum of, environmental protection policy. In that sense, the mediatization of environmental policy, where debates are not only ‘mediated’ but where policy is enacted and performed through and ‘with’ news media, can be seen as serving vested interests, or at the very least, a perspective that firmly identifies the natural world as a resource to be exploited rather than protected. Our findings suggest some accord between ESD – as a policy staple designed to deliver the environment (and humanity) protection from industrial production – and the increasing presence of industry sources in news media debates about environmental protection. As such, ESD does not serve to progress policy, but to frustrate its momentum.

News coverage of the 1981 announcement of World Heritage Listing reflected the shift from policy and law that facilitated exploitation to an emerging governance framework that supported environmental protection. Much of the political debate at this time was focused on addressing the ambiguity, or absence, of legal and constitutional authority required to protect (or exploit) the Reef (Bowen and Bowen, 2002). In 1981, these instruments, such as the World Heritage Convention, were relatively innovative and simply conveyed, and thus deemed newsworthy. In 1981 too, global warming, carbon pollution and the associated debates about fossil fuels had not entered public discourse in any significant fashion. By 2012, however, the news appetite for protest had waned and decades of policy-making based on the principles of ESD made the contest around the ‘Protect the Reef’ campaign more complex, especially because industry sources had joined the dominant political voices to argue that not all protection was good, that environmental policy-making was impinging on business and that protection was, at times, a negative or undesirable. As a result, politicians and industry voices dominated Australian news coverage and the perspective of ENGOs and scientists became marginalized.

In terms of Hutchins and Lester's (2015) theory, the pillars of industry and formal politics dominated coverage in 2012 and it is possible to see the convergence of three related forces: modern environmental policy, premised on protection and underpinned by ESD as it has evolved over several decades; contemporary neoliberal politics, which shifts ‘state intervention to new forms of governance underpinned by a ‘logic of competitiveness’’ (Birch and Mykhnenko, 2010: 7); and finally, commercial media that enabled, but also limited, the discursive arena in which mediatized environmental conflict was enacted. In Strömbäck's (2008) terms, to what extent has the mediatization of politics over the last 50 years impacted environmental policy and debate? When these protection policy moments are mediatized, news media are performing a role in structuring the debates within the confines of ESD and, in the process, the many possibilities and alternatives are lost in narrow definitions of ‘protection’.

In the case examined here, the beneficiaries of this powerful convergence of environmental politics and policy are industry and formal politics at the cost of ENGOs, scientists and activists, all of whom enter this terrain with a significant deficit. In short, the recognition of human and nature connectedness that underpinned environmental protection policy, including ESD and the World Heritage Convention, is eroded in Australian media reporting of the Reef in 2012. For the Reef, balancing the conflict of ESD – of eco-centred ethics with commercial and market imperatives in environmental conflict – is largely performed by the Australian news media as a two horse race between politicians and the extractive industries of mining, fishing and tourism. Over time, the mediatization of environmental conflict, often centred on environmental policy and ESD, has perhaps predictably privileged the inclusion of industry voices. This industry focus was not the intent of ESD but was its greatest criticism and for some, threat (Redclift, 2005; Robinson, 2004). As Worster (1994) notes, the recognition of interconnectedness of ecology in the modern era has fallen somewhat short of its goal to better manage human–nature relations manifesting a ‘political economy of ecology’. This observation is certainly evident in the reporting of protection policy here, where concerns for the Reef's ‘ecology’ are subsumed by the uneasy companionship of industrial development and its associated economic priorities. Professional journalism practices and news media appear to have transformed to fit with the objectives of politics and industry sources so that news rounds and legitimate sources easily cement the Reef debate in terms of politics and industry rather than ecology, which requires the perspectives of sources from science, conservation and Indigenous rights.

In short, the increasing coverage of protection of the Reef over time has not translated to an increasingly ecological perspective in news coverage. As this article shows, increasing editorial content introduced more opportunities for more voices. However, these sources and voices served to challenge earlier assumptions that protecting the Reef was a positive action. In this sense, and ironically enough, the introduction of ESD as the backbone of environmental protection policy has led to news coverage that challenges protection in ways that did not exist in 1981. At the same time, some things have not changed. Since the earliest campaigns to protect the Reef, environmental conflict has largely been enacted in the political sphere at local, state and national levels and contemporary news reporting continues to silence the perspectives of scientists, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, ENGOs and other activists. These are the individuals and groups, many with knowledge and expertise in ecology, who are more likely to prioritize the ecological component in the ESD formula. Yet, their voices are barely heard and so, their perspectives are silent. In 2012, mediatized environmental conflict was thus constituted and performed within the narrow parameters of ESD where Reef ecology and its protection is primarily told in stories about industry and industrial development. At these critical moments when policy and law enable and limit permissible actions on the Reef, the pillars of mediatized environmental conflict barely collide.

In the case of significant protection policy moments – those potential ‘switching points’ in Reef conflict – Hutchins and Lester's (2015) mediatized environmental conflict quadrangle – constituted of activists’ strategies and campaigns, journalistic practices and news reporting, formal politics and decision-making processes, and industry activities and trade – look more like the ‘twin towers’ of industry and politics.

It is clear that alongside these broader observations, the Reef had become a far more complex and contested space in 2012 than it was in 1981. The ‘protection’ consensus that was apparent in 1981 was absent in 2012. These nuances are best exhibited in the contrast between mining and tourism evident in the two regional papers of Gladstone and Cairns where the environmental conflict about the Reef is represented as a local issue with particular social, political and economic considerations. Cairns tourism, which has a disproportionate stake in ensuring the Reef maintains its position on the World Heritage List, still maintained a dominant discourse that protecting the Reef was undesirable. Headlines included claims that ‘Greens anti-coal stance was irrational’ and further marine parks would lock out fishers. Further south, the reduced reporting in The Gladstone Observer points to the ‘invisibility’ of the resources industry in some Australian newspapers (Lester, 2010). Arguably, the contest between ecological sustainability and development, which has reached a crescendo in an era of climate crisis, is articulated more clearly at this local level, where impacts are immediate and felt by everyone (Foxwell-Norton, 2018, 2015). In Cairns, the fishers and tourism operators who rely on fishing charters mobilized to reject extending protection to the Coral Sea, but any concerns that fishers or tourism industry might have for the protection of the Reef, in response to UNESCO's report or the benefits of extending marine reserves, were absent. Further south, the absence of reporting in Gladstone, despite the town being named in the report, is an anomaly that points to both editorial and political relationships that seek to control political debate and limit policy debate about the Reef through omission. These smaller regions also direct our analysis to the very specific role of local media in relation to being a place where it is possible to articulate and represent the nature of relations between local people and their landscapes – and where the impact of local, national and international environmental policies are tangible. These ideas direct critical attention to the ‘where’ of journalism and media, and media ownership, in relation to the cultural dimension of representations of place and the critical role of knowledge of the local landscape in reporting (Foxwell-Norton, 2018; Griffin, 1999; Hess and Waller, 2014; Zelizer, 1993).

Conclusions: The Reef under pressure

This study has identified the evolution of modern environmental protection policy as the preeminent site of mediatized environmental conflict, exploring this phenomenon through an examination of two critical policy protection moments pertaining to the Great Barrier Reef. At these critical junctures in development of environmental policy to protect the Reef, ‘protection’ in news media shifted from a positive frame dominated by political actors to a contemporary condition where protection policy is contested by political and industry interests. ENGOs, scientists and other likely pro-protection sources struggle for inclusion during these moments of environmental policy conflict. The presence of industry in these debates is an expression of the increasing currency and institutionalization of ESD policy that (inter alia) elevate and legitimize the role of industry in the formation of environmental protection policy. This confluence of industry, environmental policy premised on ESD and the impact of the mediatization of environmental conflict over the last 50 years of the Reef's management raises questions about the realized and future role of Australian news media in the current and future debates about the Reef's protection. Indeed, the increasing visibility of natural environments and policy protection efforts has not translated into strong messages of support for the environment. This is evident in the selection of sources and news media framing of policy purporting to protect the Reef at critical moments in policy delivery and deliberations. As a result, the logic of environmentally sustainable development that underpins environmental protection policy is being utilized to question and silence the ecological knowledge and concern that was, ironically, its original ambit. Reef protection policy is confused by the privileging of voices that know ‘economic development’ rather than the scientific and other counter voices that privilege an ecological perspective to human well-being and development.

In this article, we have focused our analysis on two key moments in the Reef conflict: the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger. These events occurred in the context of almost 50 years of environmental protest over industrial development and mining on the Reef, beginning with the ‘Save the Reef’ campaign in the late 1960s and continuing to the ‘Fight for the Reef’ campaign. Intersecting these processes has been the development and implementation of environmental policy that aimed, at best, to temper the impacts of industrial production and capitalism. This period of policy development was accompanied and informed by the growth of global media corporations. This investigation of the communication of Reef conflict through this lens of the mediatization of policy development suggests that Australia's news media organizations struggle to articulate the merits of protecting the Reef as a national or international goal. Further research could investigate the extent to which this shift in framing is due to editorial decisions based on political and industrial power relationships at the local and national levels, which would require investigating the personal and organizational logics of newsroom practice and culture. Other natural and cultural World Heritage sites also await investigation that would highlight the specificity of local contexts and media, and the salience of modern environmental policy.

Over time, mediatized environmental conflict of the Reef has been increasingly enacted and performed within the social, political and structural constraints of ESD. As such, concepts of protection remain the sine qua non of World Heritage and other international environmental policy agendas. Environmental policy, and associated legislative processes, matter because they define and administer what is permissible in our environments. This article brings the observation that international power and the influence of environmental policy premised on ESD inform the enactment of mediatized environmental conflict. Our research suggests that the mediatization of environmental protection policy still fails to balance the needs of humanity with the needs of nature, which, while equally controversial and ambitious, was the promise of ESD. Instead, in recent years, Australian news media appear to have tipped the balance in favour of industry and development. This finding anticipates further efforts to unpack news media's role in communicating the idea and merits of ‘ecological sustainability’ with regard to the protection of the Reef as well as other natural and cultural heritage sites.