Policing the Climate Crisis: Media Fearmongering and State Repression of Climate Protesters in Australia, Canada, and the United States Within the Post-2016 Conjuncture

This paper examines the present-day, post-2016 conjuncture of rising authoritarianism and reactionary politics through an analysis of news media and the symbolic criminalization of climate campaigners, Indigenous land and water defenders, and climate justice activists across major publications of record in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing upon Stuart Hall’s influential work on media fearmongering and Othering and his “conjunctural analysis” approach, we examine national news media representations of climate protests with an eye towards wider, political-economic contexts and conditions. This approach allows us to glean insights into a period of profound change while identifying discursive mechanisms of power within and across borders. Through a historically contextualized and cross-national analysis of news reports and opinion commentaries on recent climate protest events, we ultimately reveal how prominent national news outlets in Australia, Canada, and the United States are positioning protesters, and particularly historically marginalized groups who are a part of climate movements, as deviant, criminal, and threatening to the stability and security of the nation-state. We argue that this is significant because these derogatory representations are circulating across borders at the same time as states are specifically targeting and outlawing political, anti-fossil fuel, and infrastructure-oriented forms of climate protest.