At the contemporary historical juncture, our environments have never been so administered for protection and conservation. International organisations and treaties, alongside local and national governments, debate and implement policy after policy, accompanied by announcement after announcement – all of which seek to administer our environments to balance human impacts and damage to ecological fragilities. Despite the rise and permeation of these relatively new environmental policies over nearly 50 years, our environments are facing threats from which we can barely imagine a reprieve, let alone a solution capable of thwarting ecological disaster. Our policies are, by and large, failing to protect our environments.

Drawing on the Great Barrier Reef as a case study, this paper will consider the role of news media in reporting key ‘protection’ policy moments in the history of the Reef. Since the 1970s, the Great Barrier Reef has been a site where environmental policy has flourished, mirroring global environmental policy movements. The communication of environmental policy in the public sphere has been a key role for Australian news media. For many Australians (and others) their knowledge of the Reef, policy and any conflict and controversy therein, is communicated by news media.

In this paper we consider three key Reef policy moments: the 1974 establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park by the Australian government; the 1981 World Heritage Listing; and the 2012 threat by the IUCN to place the Reef on the World Heritage in Danger List. For each policy moment, we have collected news content across four newspapers: two regional dailies, which service communities alongside the Reef, and one state and one national publication.

This research offers insights into the role of various news media in reporting the Reef. We find significant, and at times troubling, changes in the ways ‘protection’ policy has been reported over time in the Australian context. We provide a nuanced analysis that explores the historical, cultural and political context of reporting these key policy moments. Evident in this examination is the role of news media in different geographic contexts, highlighting the complex politics of protection, from the dawn of environmental ‘protection’ policy to the contemporary era of protecting the Reef in the context of environmental crises.