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Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit 'quiet advocacy' practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since mid-2018, school students across the world have been leading mass strikes to demand strengthened political action on climate change. This article explores how young people's political participation in the School Strike for Climate movement in Australia was represented in newspaper coverage over a 17-month period (August 2018–December 2019), with particular attention to the representation of young people's emotions and actions. The analysis works with a corpus of 500 articles published in Australian national, state (New South Wales and Victoria), and a select sample of regional and rural newspapers. The corpus is read with affective-discursive attunement to historical representations of children and young people, the politics of emotion, and contemporary media representational politics surrounding climate justice activism. Four dominant characterisations of the young strikers are analysed: ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, rebellious truants, and extraordinary heroes. Alongside these characterisations, we consider how young people speak back to these characterisations, and draw implications for future research with young climate justice activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]