Policing the Climate Crisis: Media Fearmongering and State Repression of Climate Protesters in Australia, Canada, and the United States Within the Post-2016 Conjuncture
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it