Never mind the science, News Corp has strengthened its climate denialism machine

The News Corp climate denial machine — all those cogs in its opinion pages finely tuned to reverse Aesop’s fable and repeatedly croak out: “No wolf here!” — has a problem. Extreme weather events have made it all but impossible to ignore the climate wolf threatening to blow our houses down.

No worries, it’s time to call in the ideology engineers for a bit of message realignment. With just a spot of tinkering, the machine has cranked out two new talking points for the US company’s loyal political wing in the Liberal and National Parties. These are the “ute tax” and the “absolute travesty” of the aesthetics of offshore wind farms.

They’ve reengineered the underlying denialism, too. Sure, they say now, the climate may be changing, but it’s not our fault. It’s not, as the cloistered academics would say, “anthropogenic”. 

If global heating is not caused by humans burning fossil fuels, why would humans be able to do anything about it? (And, just in case, why not go, umm, nukular?)

This so-called “attribution” denialism accepts the effect while denying the cause. It’s long been part of the denialist toolkit (remember sun spots?), along with what Australia’s leading analyst of denialism, John Cook, calls denying the trend (“it’s just not happening”) and denying the impact (“it’s not making any difference anyway”).

“Attribution” has always been the weakest form of denialism, raising doubts rather than definitively rejecting. But as a recent US study found, its danger lies in being the gateway drug to a more full-blown repudiation of the science itself.

And the guide at the gate ushering them through? Why Fox News, of course, and the grab bag of right-wing media voices following on behind. 

Rupert Murdoch’s bold 2007 commitment to zero corporate emissions (under, it was said, urging from his then likely heir James) was short lived. Once the global right embraced denialism as a core strategy, his media outlets, particularly here in Australia, quickly pivoted. 

From Abbott’s “absolute crap” moment in 2009, it became central to News Corp’s editorial positioning. A 2013 study by the University of Technology Sydney found that the company’s then two largest papers –Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun in Melbourne — were overwhelmingly hostile to climate change, with more than 60% of articles on the subject either outright rejecting the science or raising doubts about it.

In 2014, even the normally cautious Press Council felt compelled to express “considerable concern” about inaccuracies in the company’s coverage of data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

Shrug. “Whatever happened to global warming?” the company’s Wall Street Journal insouciantly asked later that year.

Why did climate denial suddenly become a touchstone for the global right? After all, when Rupert was pumping zero emissions, John Howard seemed to have been dragged reluctantly by his then environment minister Malcolm Turnbull to the idea of an emission trading scheme. The following year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain mouthed similar support.

Follow the money. Fossil fuel corporates and the foundations they fund together with corrupt petro-states built a climate change denial countermovement. Surprising, I know, but here in Australia too.

As we’re discovering again with “ute tax”, offshore wind farms and largely astro-turfed protests against solar on farmland, this denialist countermovement has built its protests around neoliberal, anti-regulatory talking points. It’s been tagged “the anti-reflexivity thesis“, which is the argument that denialism is standing up for industrial capitalism.

It appeals to a certain old-style machismo — the good ol’ days of physical, manual jobs that matter for poorly educated men (and to the regional communities built around them).

It was this thesis that Abbott captured in three words: “Axe the tax!”

Now, the Liberal-National-News Corp coalition is having another go at the same old play. But, suddenly, it’s finding the going that much harder. 

Continued heat records have shattered denials of the trend, while bushfires, floods and mass extinctions are shattering the comfort of impact denialism. The enduring attribution denialism is proving just too weak to sustain the right’s countermovement.

In October 2021, in the wake of the IPCC report that definitively linked extreme events like Australia’s bushfires to global heating, News Corp attempted to shift to talk of “real practical solutions”  (unsuccessfully as it quickly turned out). It coincided with Canberra’s political gallery having one of its regular collective hope-over-experience frissons when Morrison (remember him?) committed to net-zero by 2050 (insert: smiley face) devoid of any practical measures (insert: sad face).

Now, about 30 months later, we’re back where we started. The only change? Right-wing media and the political parties they support seem determined to leap over the science to a fact-free denial in practice.