Picture sea ice in your mind. You probably imagine brilliant white, snow-covered floes floating on the surface of the ocean, home to penguins in the south of the globe or polar bears in the north.

But our new research shows Antarctic sea ice can turn into rafts of rotting floes (the free-floating pieces of ice) or an icy green slush when it interacts with waves in the stormiest ocean on the planet.

We now know the wave-driven processes that cause the surface of the sea ice to melt are a “missing link” in understanding what’s driving the increasing Antarctic sea ice melt each summer.

These processes can dramatically increase the rate the ice melts, with major implications for the global climate and Antarctic marine ecosystems.

Our planetary heartbeat

Each year, the sea ice that hugs the coast of Antarctica expands from 3 million square kilometres in summer to 19 million square kilometres in winter, stretching far north into the Southern Ocean. As the sun rises and the temperatures increase, it retreats again.

This remarkable seasonal change is like a heartbeat within our planet’s climate system, moderating global temperatures, driving ocean circulation and forming a unique habitat for a plethora of living organisms, all adapted to its seasonal rhythms.

The annual summer sea ice melt is particularly remarkable because it occurs over only three months. But even the most sophisticated climate models underestimate the rapid rate of sea ice retreat each summer.

How do waves melt sea ice?

Until now, the waves travelling from the ice-free ocean into the area covered in sea ice had only been studied for their role in breaking up ice floes. We knew these smaller floes were prone to melting around their sides and bottoms as the ocean was heated by the sun as summer progressed.

But this is not the full story.

We now know waves also flood over ice floes, washing away the bright snow cover that shields the underlying ice from sunlight and creating ponds of seawater on the floe surfaces.

Due to their reduced brightness, the snow-free ice and these “wave ponds” absorb substantially more solar heat than snow-covered ice, and this melts the ice from the top down. Moreover, the snow-free ice and wave ponds are oases in which algae thrive, turning the ice and ponds green and absorbing even more heat from the sun.

The waves also pulverise the floes into small fragments and slush. Under the right conditions, the combination of wave flooding, algal greening and pulverisation turns the sea ice cover into a slushy mixture, resembling a green soup.

We estimate that flooding, ponding and pulverisation can increase summer-time ice thinning by over 4 centimetres per day. Algal greening can add an additional 1 centimetre of thinning per day. These are extraordinary accelerators of ice melt, considering that most Antarctic sea ice is less than 1 metre thick at the end of winter.

Waves are also generated deep within the Antarctic sea-ice region by winds blowing over large openings in the ice cover. In this way, wave melt processes eat away at the ice cover from within, as well as from the edge throughout summer.

Feedbacks could trigger further melt

Our ice melt estimates are significant, yet they are likely underestimates. They do not account for amplifications to melting caused by so-called “positive feedbacks”.

For example, the ice darkening caused by waves removing the snow, ponding and pulverisation substantially increases the amount of sunlight absorbed by the ice. This causes additional surface and interior melting, which further reduces the ice brightness. And this causes more vertical melting, and so on, in an amplifying cycle.

We propose that this positive feedback is strengthened by algal greening that further darkens the ice, leading to further absorption of sunlight and melting.

Exactly how much these feedbacks would cause further ice melt is tricky to quantify, so we have left this as an exciting future research challenge.

Ponds at both poles

The Antarctic “wave ponds” we have observed are the seawater equivalent of “melt ponds”. These form extensively across Arctic sea ice in summer from pooling snow meltwater.

These freshwater melt ponds have been intensively studied and integrated into climate models, because of their important role in the rapid decline in the coverage and thickness of Arctic sea ice over recent decades.

Unlike melt ponds, seawater wave ponds occur year-round. Although they only occur in regions where sea ice interacts with ocean waves, this encompasses a large proportion of Antarctic sea ice over the course of a year.

The future of Antarctic sea ice

The effects of wave melt, greening and associated feedbacks are likely to intensify on sea ice around Antarctica over coming decades. Climate change is predicted to increase wind speeds and wave heights across the polar Southern Ocean.

This disruption of the annual sea ice cycle and further sea ice loss has serious consequences for global climate and marine ecosystems.

We need further observations using autonomous camera systems on icebreakers and modelling research to better understand these wave processes and their overall influence on Antarctica’s sea ice cycle.

These advances are vital to understanding the causes of recent dramatic sea-ice losses around Antarctica, and promise vital insights about the future of the icy south and our Earth system.

Luke Bennetts receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Bonnie Light receives funding from the United States National Science Foundation and the United States Office of Naval Research.

Petteri Uotila receives funding from the Research Council of Finland.

Rob Massom receives funding from the Australian Government's Australian Antarctic Program Partnership and the Australian Research Council.

Philip Reid does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This year’s RISING festival in Melbourne, the host of the newly established Australian Dance Biennale, was brimming with local and interstate dance shows.

Comparatively, the international offer was much more limited, yet the return of two enfants terribles of European dance, Northern Irish choreographer Oona Doherty and Austrian maverick Florentina Holzinger, were the highlight of this rich dance program.

Hard to be Soft: A Belfast Prayer

Doherty’s Hard to be Soft was made almost a decade ago. It is part of a series called A Concrete Song, in which her solo, Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus, put her on the choreographic map.

Hard to be Soft is composed of four tableaux, each with its own distinct flavour – each unfolding in the heavy fragrance of an incense-fuming thurible.

A group of ghostly figures opens the piece. Their presence already smells of churches and prayers, of troubles and mourning.

The first solo, initially danced by Doherty and magnificently performed here by Ryan O’Neill, is an ode to smouldering rage and suppressed emotions. There is something pristine about this figure moving in a set that gradually morphs from a cage into a cathedral.

We hear snippets of difficult lives interlaced with soothing religious music, as a simple graceful hand gesture hardens into a threatening posturing – the kind that keeps you alive in the streets of Belfast.

We can imagine those tough men and their violence, not afforded the choice to be soft. In the end, a moment of suspended grace, a dance oscillating between the sacred and the profane, and a light pointing to what may be a heavenly escape.

In the second episode we meet the “Sugar Army”, a group of young girls in colourful bomber jackets and white jeans. With slick ponytails slick and impeccable make-up, they dance as an assembly, moved by rules known only to them.

They move with confidence, defiance even, held together by the unwritten rules of sorority. High heels can be enough of an armour to get through a heavy day, a voice reminds us.

The solidarity that keeps this ensemble together tells the story of all those fierce women who might as well look good when everything else fails them.

In Meat Kaleidoscope, two staunch men cautiously advance toward each other. What kind of trouble will this be?

John Scott and Louis Lovett, uncannily similar in the weight of their presence, and the heaviness of the flesh, are fascinating as they engage in a series of aggressive tugs and hesitant embraces. One wonders which is which.

Is this a father fighting a son? One brother challenging the other? This is the dance of the strong, yet it has the softness of the fallen.

Hard to be Soft reminds us to stay human and kind, and to resist the generational cellular imbalance Doherty poetically speaks about in a closing poem, as O’Neill returns for the final solo. Here, his dance becomes more granular and heavenly, a quietening of the troubled – a prayer for the unmoored.

A Year without Summer

Holzinger’s piece starts in 1816, known as “the year without a summer”, as the sun in many parts of the world was blacked out by Indonesian volcanic ash.

It was also the year Mary Shelley and her friends, stuck in a house on a lake, feared it may be the end of the world – and perhaps, when the idea that birthed Frankenstein emerged.

This is the second time Holzinger has been invited by RISING. Many will remember her blood-churning 2023 show TANZ, a hardcore take on balletic notions of bodily perfection and beauty.

This piece delivers the same type of extravaganza. An all-female cast takes us on a breathtaking journey that starts as a full-blown sex orgy, evolves into a musical, and ends up as an avalanche of unstoppable bodily fluids.

There is something endearing about the mass of bodies slowly turning their tender dancing into an orgy. And even as the pace picks up, the flesh is vibrant, joyful and content – a joie de vivre for the end times.

But the end times will not come, as medicine can now deal with our mortality, or so we are told. We transition into a “facility”, a clinic where doctors are sadists and “anatomy is destiny”.

The cast once again prove their talent as they form a live band and turn into singers. This section is a suite of vignettes, including one that depicts Sigmund Freud inspecting a woman’s vagina in search of castrating teeth.

At one point, we see performer Xana Novais have her cheeks perilously stretched by hooks, symbolising an ultimate facelift for eternity.

Holzinger’s piece culminates in diarrhoea and vomit as the care facility returns to everyday life.

The people within face the inexorable decline of their bodily functions, while waiting for medicine to gift them an immortal condition.

Here too, is something beautifully soft and deeply human. With a touch of self-deprecating humour, Holzinger dissects our surgical quest for immortality. In doing so, she leaves us pondering the stories we tell ourselves to forget that we, mere mortals, are sometimes the monsters.

Angela Conquet does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

For months, US President Donald Trump has been fixated on Cuba. He’s issued threats and imposed additional sanctions on the island. The US military has conducted dozens of intelligence-gathering flights off the coast in recent weeks, suggesting a prelude to an invasion.

The Cuban government has indicated a readiness to negotiate with the Trump administration on some issues, such as migration, drug trafficking and investment openings for Cuban-Americans. But Cuba’s sovereignty is not negotiable.

After interviewing Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel last month, US journalist Kristen Welker seemed to catch on:

Nothing gets under [Cubans’] skin more than the notion that the United States can tell the Cuban government who should lead it or what it should be doing, how it should be governing, because that challenges the very idea of the sovereignty of the country.

This US obsession with controlling, influencing and coercing Cuba long predates Trump and even the Cold War. This is how President Theodore Roosevelt described the island in 1906:

I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we have wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere. And now, lo and behold, they have started an utterly unjustifiable and pointless revolution.

Understanding the current impasse between the two adversarial neighbours requires looking at this full arc of history. While the 1823 Monroe Doctrine sought to establish US predominance in the entire American continent, Cuba has always been a particular focus of Washington’s attention.

Read more: Cuba has survived 66 years of US-led embargoes. Will Trump’s blockade break it now?

‘Americanisation’ of the island

From the moment the 13 American colonies declared independence from Britain, Americans assumed Cuba would become part of the union. Successive US administrations sought to purchase, annex or otherwise control Cuba, claiming this was inevitable by virtue of the laws of gravity and geography. It was also seen as part of a self-proclaimed “civilising mission”.

When the Cubans eventually defeated their Spanish colonial masters in 1898, the United States stepped in and occupied the island to thwart its independence.

At the time, at least one third of Cubans were former slaves or of mixed race. The US governor of Cuba, Leonard Wood, argued they were not ready for self-government.

Certainly, the US – especially the Southern former slave holders – didn’t want another Haiti in its neighbourhood. Haitian slaves had seized control of their island nation from the French in a violent rebellion in 1804, echoing the cries of the French revolution for liberty, fraternity and equality.

The US military occupation of Cuba ended in 1902 and Cuba formally declared independence – albeit with provisions. These allowed for future US intervention whenever Washington thought the Cuban people needed a guiding hand (which turned out to be fairly often).

In the decades that followed, US business interests deeply penetrated every sector of Cuba’s economy and had complete sway over Cuban governments.

On a cultural level, Cuba rapidly became “Americanised” through a new US-style education system. Travel to the island picked up, too. The popular Terry’s Guide to Cuba reassured US visitors in the 1920s they would feel right at home because “thousands [of Cubans] act, think, talk and look like Americans”.

Castro’s mission

All of this changed with the rise of Fidel Castro.

During the Cuban Revolution, Castro announced in April 1959 that the revolutionary government would be “Cubanising Cuba”. This might seem “paradoxical”, he explained, but Cubans “undervalued” everything Cuban. They had become “imbued with a type of complex of self-doubt” in the face of the overwhelming US influence on the island’s culture, politics and economy.

US journalist Elizabeth Sutherland similarly observed at the time that Cubans suffered from a “cultural inferiority complex typical of colonised peoples”.

For North Americans, however, Castro’s blunt statement seemed at best to reflect ingratitude, and at worst, an insult. As the US broadcaster Walter Cronkite recalled:

The rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba was a terrible shock to the American people. This brought communism practically to our shores. Cuba was a resort land for Americans […] we considered it part of the United States.

At the heart of Cuba’s revolutionary project has been an assertion of Cuba’s sovereignty, independence and national identity. The drive has been to create a new, united and socially just Cuban nation, as envisioned by its great national hero and poet, José Martí.

So, for Cubans it’s a matter of history. For North Americans, it’s a matter of self-image. They had “convinced themselves,” writes historian Louis A. Pérez, of the “beneficent purpose […] from which [the US] derived the moral authority to presume power over Cuba”.

When the Obama administration finally resumed relations with Cuba in 2014, it felt like a historic shift was taking place. The US might finally respect Cuban sovereignty and engage with Cuba on equal terms.

As President Barack Obama said at the time:

It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse. […] We can never erase the history between us, but we believe that you should be empowered to live with dignity and self-determination.

Trump has now reverted to Washington’s traditional neo-colonialist view of Cuba, proclaiming he can do what he likes with the island. Perhaps it is time to try a new approach. As the spectacular debacle of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion showed 65 years ago, Cubans remain ready to defend their independence and their right to determine their own future.

Deborah Shnookal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Newspoll corroborates two polls I reported last week that had One Nation first on primary votes, although only by one point in Newspoll instead of three points in the YouGov and Redbridge polls.

Anthony Albanese’s net approval slumped seven points to -24, a record low below his previous record low -21 in February 2025.

This article also includes coverage of the June 2 US California jungle primary and the June 18 UK Makerfield byelection. A Queensland state poll gave the LNP a big lead.

Newspoll

A national Newspoll, conducted June 1–4 from a sample of 1,240, gave One Nation 31% of the primary vote (up four since the previous Newspoll that was taken after the May 12 budget), Labor 30% (down one), the Coalition 18% (down two), the Greens 11% (down one) and all Others 10% (steady).

This is a record high for One Nation in Newspoll, the worst for Labor since 2011–13, when they were at 26–30% during Julia Gillard’s government and the Coalition’s worst since their February low that led to Sussan Ley’s axing as Liberal leader.

Since the mid-April Newspoll that was the last one taken before the budget, One Nation is up seven points, Labor down one, the Coalition down three, the Greens down two and all Others down one.

No two-party estimate was published, but The Australian’s report said “Labor would still lead under a two-party-preferred model slightly ahead of either One Nation or the Coalition”.

Albanese’s net approval slumped seven points to -24, with 60% dissatisfied and 36% satisfied. His net approval is below his previous low of -21 in February 2025. But two and a half months after Albanese’s February 2025 low, Labor won the May 2025 election by its biggest margin since 1943.

Here is a graph of Albanese’s net approval in Newspoll with a trend line. His net approval had its second-term peak in August 2025 at +3, but it has been in the negative double digits since January this year, after the Bondi terror attacks.

Former Liberal PM Scott Morrison’s worst net approval was -22, with former Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull the last PM to have an equal or worse net approval than Albanese.

Angus Taylor’s net approval improved two points to -10 (45% dissatisfied, 35% satisfied). Albanese led Taylor as better PM by 44–38 (46–38 previously).

On Australian politics, 61% said it is overdue for a big shake-up, while 26% said “Decades of steady governance have delivered prosperity that more chaotic political systems can only envy”.

US California jungle primary and UK Makerfield byelection

In California’s June 2 “jungle primary”, all candidates ran on the same ballot paper and the top two, regardless of party, qualified for the November general election. Counting is slow in California, with only 76% counted statewide now.

In April, Democrats had feared that two Republicans could advance in the gubernatorial primary, forcing an all-Republican gubernatorial general election in a heavily Democratic state. But Democrat Xavier Becerra has 27.3%, Republican Steve Hilton 25.4%, Democrat Tom Steyer 22.0% and Republican Chad Bianco 10.5%.

Becerra has been called as advancing and is likely to be joined by Hilton. Becerra will be strongly favoured to win in November.

In the Los Angeles mayoral election, incumbent Karen Bass faced a left-wing challenger (Nithya Raman) and a right-wing challenger (Spencer Pratt). With 83% in, Bass has 34.7%, Raman 27.1% and Pratt 26.7%. On election night, Pratt had led Raman by 30.0–20.3. With this trend, Raman is virtually certain to win the second runoff position.

A special election in California’s first federal seat occurred concurrently with the primary, after the Republican incumbent died in January. This seat voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 24.9 point in 2024. It has now been gerrymandered into a Democratic seat, but the 2024 boundaries were used for the special.

With 89% in, Republican James Gallagher was elected outright with 62.3%, avoiding a runoff by winning a majority. Two Democrats combined won 35.7%. Republicans overall won by 27.8 points, 2.9 points better for them then Trump’s 2024 margin.

After dismal results for UK Labour at May 7 Welsh and Scottish parliamentary elections and English local elections, PM Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership came under pressure. The Labour MP for Makerfield resigned to allow Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to run. If Burnham wins the June 18 Makerfield byelection, he is expected to challenge Starmer.

At the 2024 general election, Labour won Makerfield by 45.2–31.8 over the populist right Reform, but Reform won 50% in wards within Makerfield at the May local elections. A late May Survation poll of Makerfield gave Burnham a 49–39 lead over Reform, up from a 43–40 Burnham lead in mid-May.

There’s much more on California and Makerfield in my coverage for The Poll Bludger.

Queensland LNP extends big lead

A Queensland state DemosAU and Premier National poll, conducted May 27 to June 3 from a sample of 1,033, gave the Liberal National Party (LNP) 34% of the primary vote (steady since the February DemosAU poll), Labor 25% (down three), One Nation 24% (up three), the Greens 10% (steady) and all Others 7% (steady). The LNP led Labor by 58–42 after preferences, a two-point gain for the LNP.

Since the October 2025 DemosAU poll, One Nation is up ten points, the LNP down three, Labor down four, the Greens down two and all Others down one.

LNP incumbent David Crisafulli led Labor’s Steven Miles as preferred premier by 47–30 (43–32 in February). By 43–37, respondents thought Queensland was headed in the right direction (44–36 right in February).

Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Marjane Satrapi, best known for her memoir and film Persepolis, has died, aged 56. The death of this much loved Iranian–French artist, graphic novelist, film-maker and activist has been met with widespread celebration of her life – and its dedication to resistance, freedom and humanity. French president Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a great artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable”.

Satrapi was born in Rasht (like my own mother) in 1969, then raised in Tehran. She came of age during the Iranian Revolution and the turbulent years that followed. As political repression intensified, members of her family and wider social circle were arrested, persecuted – and in some cases, executed, like her uncle Anoosh, a former political prisoner and exile, executed by the Islamic Republic.

First published in 2000, Persepolis created a transformative shift in comics, memoir and political storytelling. Eventually extended into four volumes, it follows Satrapi’s childhood, her adolescence in Vienna (where her parents sent her to study in 1983) and her later struggle to navigate belonging between Iran and Europe. Satrapi returned to Tehran to attend university in 1989. In 1994, she moved back to Europe.

Satrapi finished her studies in France, where she settled, gaining French nationality in 2006. Last year, she refused France’s prestigious legion d'honneur, over its “hypocrisy” in its dealings with Iran.

Satrapi illustrated the dislocations of revolution, migration, adolescence and return in such a way that her memoir travelled far beyond her home country. Through its deceptively simple black-and-white illustrations, Persepolis became globally influential because it offered an intimate account of revolutionary Iran and exile that challenged dominant stereotypes.

For many readers, Satrapi is still the woman who explained Iran in the simplest, yet most powerful way.

Growing up between worlds with Marjane

Today, reading Persepolis with a cup of tea and a candle lit in Satrapi’s memory, I am struck by how little my reaction has changed since first watching the film at a university screening in France in 2019.

Like Marjane, I grew up between worlds: the child of returnees in the early days of the revolution, a girl who wore the compulsory hijab, listened to Western music, argued with authority, fell in love, had her heart broken and dreamed of lives beyond the horizon. Later, I welcomed political activism, harassment, migration and multiple exiles into my life. Yet what made Persepolis so powerful was not that it reflected my experiences of repression, but that it captured everything beyond.

Satrapi reminded the world that Iranians are not merely subjects of geopolitics or victims of authoritarianism. We have families, friendships, humour, terrible fashion choices, impossible romances and complicated identities.

Like all great memoirs, Persepolis made the particular universal. It allowed readers to see themselves in an Iranian girl from Tehran. In doing so, it made it harder to deny our shared humanity. Her art has the kind of charm that allows everyone to see themselves in one corner of it or another.

In Satrapi’s hands, exile was neither heroic nor tragic. It was disorienting, lonely, creative and politically productive. Her enduring legacy, however, lies not simply in what she told the world about the country she left behind, but in what she revealed about the experience of living between worlds as a human being.

“I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity.”

Few lines from Persepolis capture the condition of exile more powerfully than this one.

Reading Persepolis at different times of one’s life offers a language for contradictions that often feel impossible to explain: loving one’s country while criticising it, belonging to multiple places while feeling fully accepted by none, and carrying memories across borders that others struggle to understand.

In telling her own story, Satrapi captured something far larger than herself. In her 56 years of life, she stayed true to herself and never forgot where she came from.

Iran: misunderstood and dehumanised

After the Islamic Revolution, the hostage crisis in the United States, the wars with Iraq and the emergence of a new world order after 9/11, Iran became a misunderstood country, its population dehumanised. Satrapi’s memoir restored its complexities and nuances to the imaginations of readers from different backgrounds.

The power of Persepolis comes precisely from its ordinariness. Readers follow the life of a rebellious teenager. They learn about her family, grandparents, friends, teenage crushes, a failed marriage and the arguments that liven up any dinner table. Marjane’s story – garnished with music, humour and grief – reveals how extraordinary historical events are experienced through the mundane rhythms of everyday life.

Yet Persepolis is equally about leaving behind familiarity and home. Throughout, family becomes both refuge and history.

In one of the book’s most moving sections, Satrapi’s beloved Uncle Anoosh tells her, “Our family memory must not be lost.” Decades later, those words resonate for me. Reading them, I often think of my own uncle, Kambiz, whom I lost long before my birth, when he was executed by the Islamic Republic aged 23.

But the significance of this moment extends beyond the boundaries of any single household. In authoritarian contexts, where states often seek to monopolise history and memory, families become custodians of alternative narratives. In stories passed down by parents, grandparents and relatives, Satrapi preserves memories of political imprisonment, resistance – and hope that official accounts might prefer to erase.

Nominated for an Oscar

Satrapi returned to Iran before eventually settling in France, where she built the artistic career that would make her one of the most influential voices of the Iranian diaspora. She created several graphic storytelling books.

She co-wrote and co-directed the animated 2007 film adaptation of Persepolis, and was nominated for an Oscar, becoming the first woman nominated in the category of best animated feature. She went on to direct feature films.

Satrapi’s alternative view of Iran is so compelling because she refuses to romanticise her own country, or to idealise Europe or the West. She rejects both nostalgic nationalism and complete assimilation. Instead, she inhabits the uncomfortable space in between.

For many Iranian migrants and exiles who came after her, this condition feels deeply familiar. Loving a country while criticising it. Belonging to multiple places while feeling fully accepted by none. Carrying memories that others cannot quite understand. Satrapi transformed these contradictions into a language that could be shared.

She critiqued the repression of the Islamic Republic while remaining critical of Western hypocrisy. She condemned fanaticism without embracing cultural superiority. “Between one’s fanaticism and the other’s disdain, it’s hard to know which side to choose,” she wrote in Persepolis.

Importantly, Satrapi never positioned herself as the sole voice of Iran. Rather, she understood her work as a form of translation. As Iran enters yet another period of uncertainty, marked by regional conflict, repression and deepening social fractures at home and in the diaspora, Satrapi continued to insist on the humanity and complexity of Iranian lives.

Her activism included supporting the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini: a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman detained for allegedly not properly wearing the Islamic headscarf in 2022.

Her final years were spent challenging both the authoritarianism of the Iranian state and what she saw as the West’s persistent tendency to reduce Iranians to geopolitical abstractions, rather than people with histories, aspirations and agency.

A gift for generations of exiles

For many Iranian exiles, Persepolis remains more than a memoir. It is a map. A guide to memory, identity, belonging and survival. It reminds me that exile is not simply a matter of geography, but of consciousness. It has taught me that dignity can be an act of resistance and that memory itself can become a political act in times of political amnesia.

Her characters rarely find liberation through departure alone; instead, they grapple with loneliness, reinvention and the persistent question of belonging. Yet Satrapi approached these themes with humour, tenderness and an insistence on complexity.

Marjane Satrapi spent her life ensuring that humanity, resistance and the memory of Iran is never forgotten. In doing so, she gave generations of readers – and generations of exiles – a more sophisticated language for understanding home, freedom and what it means to remain human between worlds.

Shadi Rouhshahbaz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has expanded access to a highly advanced model deemed too dangerous for public release, including Australia in the select handful of users.

The large language model, known as Claude Mythos, is now being rolled out to an additional 150 organisations across 15 countries, including the Australian government and several local businesses, as part of Project Glasswing.

In an era where large-scale AI launches are happening on a day-by-day basis, this limited, gradual release may seem particularly surprising. But Mythos is not like most other AI systems. Instead it’s an automated tool for assessing software to find critical bugs and vulnerabilities.

This managed release is deliberate, as the discovery of vulnerabilities in computer systems is useful for those who want to defend them and those who want to hack them.

However, the real nature of the impact of AI systems on cybersecurity is significantly more complex.

Finding hundreds of severe vulnerabilities

Under initial testing, Mythos has been able to identify multiple new high-risk vulnerabilities. Left unfixed, such flaws allow attackers to easily steal data or induce system crashes.

While these reports are promising, the raw data needs context. Of the 23,000 vulnerabilities flagged by Mythos, only 6,200 were estimated as high-risk by Mythos. However AI isn’t perfect, as human experts could only validate two in every three of these vulnerabilities as high-risk. Even still, the nature and severity of identified vulnerabilities has led developers to say that with Mythos “defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively”.

And winning this battle is extremely valuable.

Over the last few years, Australians have repeatedly been the victims of costly cybersecurity incidents, including Optus, Medibank Private, the Melbourne International Film Festival, and Canvas.

This barrage of attacks likely explain why the Australian Signals Directorate welcomed Australia’s inclusion in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing. While this AI-driven security offers huge potential benefits, the government so far has been tight-lipped on the specifics of how Mythos will actually be used.

Dangerous in the wrong hands

While discovering vulnerabilities is useful, defenders need to be able to respond to them. This is problematic when tools like Mythos produce large numbers of false reports, which have the potential to overwhelm unprepared cybersecurity teams.

More concerningly, while access to Mythos is currently tightly controlled, it will not be long until similar tools are available to help support hackers.

And it’s not just the vulnerabilities that AI can discover that pose risks.

AI systems more broadly are incredibly vulnerable to being tricked or exploited, with highly damaging consequences.

Just this week, hackers used Meta’s AI powered chatbot to gain access to high-profile Instagram accounts, including Barack Obama’s. They did so by tricking AI chatbots into changing account details. And, even after Instagram announced it fixed the issue, within hours there were reports of further accounts being compromised.

A similar attack known as Echoleak last year revealed how tying Microsoft Copilot to email accounts could introduce significant risks. This was made possible by sending emails to accounts monitored by Copilot’s AI. These emails tricked the AI into leaking large amounts of private and confidential information, without the email ever needing to be opened by a human. No longer do we live in a world where hackers need to convince users to click a malicious link, if they can instead convince the AI that reads emails to act dangerously.

Both Echoleak and the Instagram hacks underscore the risks we face as more and more organisations tie their critical functions to AI systems that are difficult to audit, and easy to exploit – even by just being persuasive.

A new balance point

All of this suggests the current cybersecurity landscape might be shifting to a new balance point, where defenders and hackers race to develop and exploit powerful AI tools.

Tools like Mythos aren’t a silver bullet. While they provide defenders with an additional set of eyes on where to look, it still will require expertise to work out what is real, and what isn’t.

But the advent of the AI era has already fundamentally changed the risks associated with poor cybersecurity practices. Every day a user or service provider delays a software update on one of their devices is a day where a vulnerability can be exploited.

For cybersecurity teams, ensuring compliance is already a difficult enough process that will only get worse when the speed of vulnerability discovery increases.

While they are high value targets for hackers, large organisations will likely remain safe, as they will have the resources to access and deploy tools like Mythos. But smaller, less resourced companies will likely not have the capacity to access these tools – or to react to the upcoming tsunami of cybersecurity updates.

And if they fall behind on these updates, these smaller companies will likely find themselves at far more risk than they ever have been before.

The cybersecurity divide between those with and without resources will only grow. Bridging this gap is not just an IT challenge – it’s a public safety concern that will affect us all.

Andrew Cullen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When major new climate change scenarios are released, there’s always strong interest. These scenarios lay out what our future climate will look like, depending on how fast we act to cut emissions.

But what was surprising about the seven new scenarios announced last week was that United States President Donald Trump took an interest.

Why? Because a high-emissions scenario – known as RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 – had been removed. Under these worst-case scenarios, nations would make no effort to cut emissions and expand fossil fuel use. By 2100, carbon dioxide levels would almost triple, to 1,135 parts per million and the world would be around 4.5°C hotter than the pre-industrial period.

The climate scientists responsible for laying out the range of possible futures removed the RCP8.5 scenarios for a very good reason. Although often slow and incomplete, our efforts to tackle climate change have made a tangible difference. We have averted the worst climate future once thought possible.

The job is far from done. Emissions are at record highs and global warming is speeding up.

But the removal of this high-emissions scenario isn’t, as Trump and other climate sceptics have claimed, a sign of failed modelling, or that climate change was a hoax. It’s a sign the expansion of solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries have slowed emissions growth.

How are these scenarios made?

Many climate impacts are becoming evident after about 1.4°C of warming – the level we’re roughly at now.

Because this period of extremely rapid climate change is due to human activities, it means we also have the opportunity to shape the future.

What will this look like? Will the world keep heating up, or will rapid action cut emissions and bring warming to a halt? The answer will make a big difference to the future humanity faces.

Predicting anything is difficult. But a group of scientists has created scenarios representing a range of possible climate futures.

Because the future is not set, scientists lay out a range of possible pathways for our future greenhouse gas emissions. They base them on what’s happened so far and what might happen in politics and technology over coming decades.

Then they select the emissions pathways deemed most plausible and then sample a range of different futures which are more or less optimistic about our fossil fuel use.

Scientific groups around the world then model these scenarios in depth using different climate models to ensure there’s a large amount of data available at global, regional and local levels.

These scenarios aren’t ranked by how likely they are. All are considered to be plausible futures. The huge range of temperature outcomes – approaching 2°C between the most and least optimistic scenarios by 2100 – points to how much of the future is in our hands.

Why the fuss about RCP8.5?

The two previous releases included two closely related scenarios – RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 respectively.

Here, “8.5” refers to radiative forcing – the level of extra heat (in watts) trapped per square metre by 2100.

In these worst-case scenarios, the world sharply boosts fossil fuel use. Unsurprisingly, this leads to very high amounts of global warming. Scientists have long argued over whether this was plausible in the first place.

None of the new scenarios are as pessimistic as RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5. The worst possible scenario now envisions high emissions leading to warming of around 3.5°C by 2100. That would still be very, very bad.

Sceptics acting in bad faith

Climate sceptics leapt on the removal of RCP8.5 as a sign the projections were wrong. These attacks were not made in good faith, but to cast doubt on climate science.

A clear eyed assessment is that RCP8.5 was removed because climate action is starting to work.

But while the worst outcome has been averted, we have also missed the window for the best future climate.

The new scenarios have no pathway as optimistic as the lowest emissions scenario from the last round of major climate projections. That scenario – SSP1-1.9 – envisaged strong climate action and rapid cuts to emissions, leading to global warming peaking at around 1.5°C.

Because global emissions haven’t yet begun to fall, the most optimistic new pathway would lead to warming peaking at about 1.9°C.

While we will definitely now pass 1.5°C, the hope is to only temporarily overshoot that level of warming while working to draw carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere to get back to 1.5°C.

Our current emissions trajectory is somewhere in the middle – below the high emissions path but well above the most optimistic scenario. Based on current policies and countries’ actions, we’re looking at around 2.6°C warming by 2100.

You might wonder why we need to keep redoing these climate scenarios.

One reason: facts change on the ground. Solar keeps rolling out far faster than expected, but fracking has opened up large new fossil fuel deposits. Political shifts make climate action more or less likely.

Another is because our climate models are continually improving. The better the models get, the more accurate and detailed our projections of sea level rise and other climate impacts can be.

Yes, this is progress

Taking RCP8.5 off the table is a sign of progress – we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario. But we have also missed the best case future.

The next five years could play out in many different ways, leading to better or worse future climates. We must understand and prepare for what we’re facing – and double down on our efforts to create the best future possible.

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.

On May 23, Caleb Shomo, lead singer of American rock/metalcore band Beartooth, publicly came out in an Instagram post as a “proudly gay man”.

The announcement was the first time Shomo took to social media after temporarily deleting his Instagram account in February, shortly after homophobic backlash following the release of the music video for Free.

In the days following the announcement, there has been blatant homophobia and attempts to twist the story into a tabloid saga, infringing on the privacy of Shomo and his family. Both function to undermine the personal and cultural significance of Caleb’s emotional post.

Shomo is by no means the only member of the LGBTQIA+ community to be in alternative music, but he now stands as one of few high-profile examples. This moment offers a chance to reflect on whether metal – a music and culture built on rebellion – amplifies or denigrates LGBTQIA+ voices.

The initial backlash

Beartooth are not newcomers to the world of metal. Shomo originally conceived the project alone in 2012. The band has since amassed a large following with 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

What else is well known is Shomo’s evolving fashion and performance style, which at first glance makes the backlash to the Free video more of a head-scratcher.

Shomo’s coming out post has comments disabled. Nevertheless, social media is engaged in a tug-of-war between support and slurs. Queer fans are excited to have representation, but opposition is attempting to tear the man down once more. This is entirely typical of the metal community.

In practice, queerness and metal should not be at odds. After all, fans and performers position metal as a music for outcasts and rebellion against societal norms.

But not all metalheads are outcasts for the same reasons.

Reflecting on past coming out moments

The metal genre has been dominated by cisgender, heterosexual people for most of its history – and this has given room for problematic behaviours to flourish.

Queer performers such as Gorgoroth and Otep Shamaya received death threats from the community after coming out in the 2000s.

The hypermasculine aesthetics of the genre have likely intensified this discrimination. Researchers such as Robert Walser have labelled metal as an “arena for gender”, where masculinity is defined, and then imposed on all metalheads. This creates barriers to participation for LGBTQIA+ individuals, as well as women and people of colour.

That said, we have seen a shift taking place in recent years. Bands comprising entirely cisgender and heterosexual men have openly embraced queer fans, including previous tourmates of Beartooth, Motionless In White, who dedicated their 2017 song Voices to the LGBTQIA+ community.

In fact, Shomo’s coming out is reminiscent of that of another gay man in metal. Rob Halford (Judas Priest) divulged what had been dubbed “the worst kept secret in metal” when he came out in a 1998 MTV interview.

Halford maintained his status in the genre after coming out, providing grounds to believe that metal, and by extension other alt music scenes, were accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community. Nonetheless, research I published earlier this year in Metal Music Studies found that homophobia and transphobia are still prevalent, both at metal shows and online.

Trans and trapped at the local level

Halford’s coming out did not open the gates to other LGBTQIA+ performers in metal. It did, however, demonstrate that if you are able to establish yourself before coming out, your career is more likely to be safe.

The same will probably be true for Shomo. But for performers attempting to enter the scene as openly LGBTQIA+, it’s a different story, especially when looking at the more marginalised individuals in the community.

Through interviews with Australian trans metal performers, I found that trans-ness functions as its own inhibitor to rising through the ranks in metal. As one interviewee shared:

me being a trans woman and probably the vocalist puts me in a big limelight, which is also a bit of an Achilles’ heel for the band getting anywhere.

Despite this, community-driven initiatives such as Transgenre prove there is a thriving community of trans performers dreaming of the success achieved by performers such as Shomo.

Unfortunately, they are trapped at the local level, rarely receiving opportunities to represent their local music scenes and trans community.

The parallels between Shomo and Halford, however, illuminate a potential chance for change. That is, Shomo has an opportunity to help shift societal attitudes within alt music, by providing more exposure to other LGBTQIA+ metal performers.

There will undoubtedly now be more queer fans drawn to Beartooth’s music. Shomo – along with the bands that surround him as allies – should consider platforming and elevating more trans and queer performers in the scene, who have been patiently waiting for an opportunity like this.

Tour lineups of global powerhouses are overpopulated by cisgender and heterosexual men. Shomo is now one of a handful of LGBTQIA+ representatives among them. His influence could turn the tide in making rock and metal’s biggest stages reflect the diversity that exists at the local level.

Vik J. Squires does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

You’re browsing a major online marketplace for a warm winter jacket, when a sponsored listing catches your eye: a black, fleece-lined jacket, prominently priced for sale from A$18.99 each. It’s just what you want. So you click through, ready to grab a bargain.

But when you land on the page, then select a jacket from the drop down menu, the price instantly jumps to $39.99.

It turns out the $18.99 was actually for a different product – a waterproof storage bag – which was inexplicably listed along with three variants of the jacket.

This is a common strategy used by online sellers. The platform’s search algorithm displays the headline image of the jacket, but pairs it with a more attractive price of a different product.

Frustrated? You’re not alone. Across online forums such as Reddit, or deal-hunting sites such as OzBargain, shoppers have long warned others about this type of “multi-variation listing” on popular shopping websites and apps.

It’s not just wasting your time: it can be illegal.

This kind of visual bait-and-switch trick could potentially be misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law. It may also breach the prohibition on “bait advertising”, applying to ads that promote “sale” prices on products that aren’t available, or available only in very limited quantities.

And a proposed prohibition on unfair trading practices, now before parliament, could soon give Australians even more power to complain.

Why visual tricks like these work

Academic research helps explain why this kind of design is so effective, and also such a problem.

When a price claim and a product image are presented in close proximity, consumers naturally assume that the price applies to the pictured product.

It is a “visual superiority effect” in advertising. Research has shown that visual superiority effect means consumers process images faster and more automatically than text.

When visual and textual elements conflict, consumers rely more heavily on the visual content in forming their judgements, and form less critical thoughts when it comes to the text, such as a product description.

Consumer watchdogs have warned this kind of design tactic is a type of “dark pattern”: tactics used to nudge, manipulate or trick you into spending more money than you’d planned, or provide personal data that’s not needed.

Research has shown nearly all consumers are susceptible to these manipulative tricks under the right conditions.

Is this actually misleading under Australian law?

Let’s go back to the example of the black winter jacket you clicked on thinking it was available from $18.99, only to discover that price was for a different product.

Is this visual bait-and-switch – where a lower price has been paired with a product image it does not apply to – misleading under Australian consumer law?

Yes, it probably is.

Retailers should be warned. The national consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), can prosecute for misleading people with eye-catching headline claims, if those are not true once you look more closely at the detail.

For instance, just over a decade ago the ACCC pursued TPG Internet in court over misleading ads, which led to a $2 million penalty. The ads had prominent headlines about attractive internet prices – with much less prominent terms qualifying the offer.

It went all the way to the High Court, which ruled that if consumers were drawn into what the judges called “the marketing web” by a misleading “dominant message”, it could be enough to be misleading under the Trade Practices Act.

Not all seemingly deceptive ads will necessarily fall within the category of misleading conduct. It can be harder to prove if the qualification to the images or pricing is revealed before the consumer adds the product to their basket.

But Australia’s laws look set to become a bit clearer on this front.

New legislation currently before federal parliament would introduce a prohibition on unfair trading practices that manipulate consumers, or “unreasonably distort” the environment in which a decision is being made to the detriment of the consumer.

That new prohibition is intended to capture “dark pattern” tactics that are “nudging or pressuring consumers into unintended actions”.

How consumer backlash and complaints can help

Research shows that when shoppers feel they have been intentionally misled, the damage to the brand’s reputation can be severe and immediate.

Price confusion doesn’t just cause frustration; it triggers a deep sense of unfairness. That unfairness can translate into action: consumers abandoning their carts, switching to competitors, and complaining to family and friends.

If you come across shopping platforms where there are consistent, manipulative bait-and-switch tactics like this being used, it may be worth asking: is it time to shop somewhere else?

Or, if you’re annoyed enough to take action, take a screenshot and contact the business.

If they don’t stop bait-and-switch sales listings, anyone can make a report to the ACCC about a false or misleading claim. Reports from customers help inform the ACCC’s education, compliance and enforcement work.

The ACCC has named misleading and manipulative pricing practices among its enforcement priorities for this financial year. Anyone selling to Australian customers should be on notice.

Jeannie Marie Paterson has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council for a project on misleading conduct.

Adrian R. Camilleri and Jessica Pallant do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When the University of Queensland Press cancelled the publication of Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money’s book Bila: A River Cycle because of a blog post by its illustrator, 60 UQP contributors signed a letter of protest. Some declared they would no longer publish with UQP. Fourteen staff members issued a statement decrying “the precedent the University of Queensland has set”.

Had HarperCollins, a publisher owned and controlled by the Murdoch family, nixed an Indigenous children’s book, the decision would perhaps not have been experienced as such a betrayal. UQP, however, boasts on its website of “publishing literary works, poetry and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander stories”: scarcely an orientation one usually associates with politicised book pulping.

The Bila episode follows a recent pattern in which supposedly progressive institutions and organisations respond to any connection to the Gaza genocide as aggressively as their right-wing counterparts, or even more so.

Conservative politicians and the right-wing press systematically demonise the Palestinian cause and its supporters. According to a study by Ette media, the Australian published, between October 7 2023 and April 9 2026, an astonishing 412 articles wholly or in part about Palestinian writer Randah Abdel-Fattah. Yet some of the most punitive campaigns have played out not in the corporate sector but at the ABC and within the university sector.

In How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Adam Johnson explores a similar phenomenon in the United States. His book does not focus, he says, on “the conservative or MAGA media’s dehumanization of Palestinians”. This is partly because right-wing outlets such as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and The Daily Wire don’t disguise their anti-Palestinian stance, but also because the timing of the war in Gaza made the reporting and commentary by supposed progressives particularly important.

“There was,” Johnson reminds us, “a Democratic president in office when the genocide began in earnest, and support from Democrats in Congress and in the think-tank and media world was dispositive in continuing said genocide.”

His critique of what he calls the “Center-Left media” is based on careful documentation of some 12,000 articles and 5,000 television clips. He brings, as they say, the receipts.

For instance, Johnson notes that CNN – a pillar of US liberalism – mentioned the child deaths in the first 100 days of the Ukraine war far more (4,223 times) than child deaths in the corresponding period in Gaza (3,632 times). On MSNBC, child victims of the Ukraine war featured 1,775 times, compared with 1,522 times for Gaza.

Yet, in the first 100 days of the Ukraine conflict, 262 children died. In Gaza, the toll of dead kids exceeded 10,000.

The systematic obliteration of civilian infrastructure in Gaza meant that, even in the initial period Johnson studied, 80% of the population was displaced. In Ukraine, the equivalent figure was only 33%. Yet Johnson finds the US television networks referred to refugees, displaced people and similar terms eight times more often for Ukrainians than for Palestinians (1,663 versus 211).

Lexical scruples

The International Association of Genocide Scholars describes the Israeli war on Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. The association’s position came after a vote, so we know it reflects the judgement of 86% of its members.

Almost all the major human rights organisations and NGOs agree, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Yet most liberal news outlets still do not use the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza.

Johnson shows how such lexical scruples do not apply elsewhere. “Even though the destruction of Gaza, by all objective metrics, has been magnitudes more brutal and deadly than that of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine,” he observes, “the totalising moral labels of ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ were used on CNN and MSNBC 17.2 times more often in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Israel’s action in Gaza.”

His review of the first 30 days of the two conflicts found that, on CNN and MSNBC, Ukrainians were described on air as victims of genocide or war crimes 1,790 times: 1,515 for war crimes and 275 for genocide. When the victims were Palestinian, the terms were used 104 times: 92 for war crimes and 12 for genocide.

“Ostensibly non-opinionated reporters and ‘analysts’ on both MSNBC and CNN,” writes Johnson, “often asserted, as a matter of fact, that Russia was committing war crimes against Ukrainians, without this being seen as violating their neutrality.”

Higher standards

Israel’s defenders insist the country should not be held to a higher standard than other nations. Johnson’s research shows the opposite is true: judgements regularly made in other contexts become controversial only when applied to Israel.

After an attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City killed about 200 Palestinians on October 17 2023, Israeli spokespeople denounced early media accounts that blamed an IDF air strike, releasing a recording purportedly capturing a dialogue between Palestinian militants accepting responsibility for the blast.

Channel 4 quickly debunked the audio as a clumsy fake; the investigative group Forensic Architecture determined that most of Israel’s claims about the hospital attack were demonstrably false.

In the months that followed, the IDF engaged in what UN experts later described as “medicide”: namely, the targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the killing of more than 1,500 healthcare workers. In one particularly ghastly incident, the IDF fired on five clearly marked ambulances and a fire truck after they came to the aid of Palestinians wounded in an earlier attack.

A subsequent investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot alleged the soldiers fired more than 900 bullets at the convoy, before shooting the survivors at close range. The IDF then deployed bulldozers to crush and cover the vehicles, and bury the dead in an unmarked mass grave.

That was one year and five months after Israeli president Isaac Herzog rejected allegations of Israeli responsibility for the Al-Ahli hospital attack as a “blood libel”.

The pushback by the Israelis led to US news outlets formulating new policies. CNN and the New York Times began instructing employees that attacks could only be attributed to Israel after confirmation from the IDF and GPS coordinate location. Johnson quotes a source at CNN:

Whether it’s in the newsroom or in the field, we couldn’t credit anything to Israel unless we were held to this impossibly high bar of having to call it an “explosion”, until we geolocated the site of the explosion, sent the coordinates to the Israelis and asked them for comment.

Asked about whether the policy was applied in other conflicts, such as the Ukraine war, Johnson’s source answers: “Never, never, never, never, never.”

Terms and conditions

Previously, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch and the US State Department had all used data from the Gaza Health Ministry because of its proven reliability. After the Al-Ahli hospital attack, US news outlets began appending the description “Hamas-controlled” or “Hamas-run” to descriptions of the health ministry. Johnson says:

in our 100-day survey period, CNN used the “Hamas-run” label and related terms 277 times and MSNBC used it 146 times, despite neither using it once between October 7, 2023 and October 17, 2023.

The practice spread, including to Australia. By October 28 2023, the Sydney Morning Herald was also attributing casualty figures to the “Hamas-controlled Health Ministry”.

While no one has yet studied the liberal media in Australia with the rigour applied by Johnson in the US, the available evidence suggests it followed the patterns he describes. As I noted in a piece for Deep Cut News, the Age published a bold editorial declaring:

There is a genocide happening today […] Our government should urgently, repeatedly and loudly call for international intervention, and lead in imposing sanctions. We should send bountiful aid to the victims, and halt economic and diplomatic relations […] unless and until the savagery is stopped. All of us, as Australians, should shun travel […] for tourism or business.

And our government should, as it did with the Syrian refugee crisis a few years ago, rapidly engineer an intake of […] refugees.

That wasn’t about Gaza. It appeared in 2017, in relation to the persecution of the Rohingya people in Mynamar.

Some commentators point to the absence of a final judgement by the International Court of Justice in relation to Gaza. But in 2017 the International Court of Justice had not ruled that the killings of the Rohingya were genocidal. It still hasn’t. The glacial pace at which the court moves means genocide allegations brought by Gambia against Myanmar remain unresolved.

Nevertheless, in 2017, the Age saw no problem with using the word “genocide” after studying reports from Medecins Sans Frontieres about “a deliberate, systematic campaign causing death and human suffering”.

Today, Medecins Sans Frontiers describes Israel’s operations in Gaza as genocidal. The Age does not. It has not published an editorial akin to that it issued in respect of Mynamar; it has not called for the government to impose sanctions, nor urged Australians to boycott Israel.

An acquiescent press

How to explain the special treatment of Israel by the liberal press?

The Gaza war focused attention on lobbyists and their influence on politics and the media. In the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee devoted the staggering sum of US$100 million in 2024 to unseating candidates it deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel.

In his book Dateline Jerusalem, veteran journalist John Lyons describes a similar process in Australia. Well before the Gaza war, he witnessed the brutal discrimination dished out by Israeli soldiers to 12-year-old Palestinians in the West Bank, but recognised that, if he reported it, “I would be the target of a backlash which would be tough, nasty and prolonged”.

So it proved. His 2014 story Stone Cold Justice won a Walkley, but he was “attacked professionally, personally and relentlessly by the pro-Israel lobby and its supporters”.

Famously, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky list “flak” from corporate lobbyists as one of the filters that produces an acquiescent press. Dissenting journalists face a barrage of time-consuming complaints so exhausting it induces preemptive self-censorship. Flak from pro-Israel groups aims, as Lyons puts it, “to make journalists decide that, even if they have a legitimate story that may criticise Israel, it’s simply not worth running it as it will cause ‘more trouble than it’s worth’”.

Along with the stick comes various carrots. In Australia, pro-Israel groups regularly provide journalists, editors and other media workers (as well as politicians) with all-expenses-paid “study trips” to the Middle East. Recipients of this largesse include a roll call of conservative media talent, but also include prominent journalists from the liberal press.

To contextualise that record, consider the response when hundreds of media workers (including me) signed an open letter on the Gaza conflict in 2023, calling on outlets to, among other issues, reject “both sideism”, centre the human casualties, show equal scepticism to IDF and Hamas reports, report credible allegations of “war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”, and cover the anti-war movement.

In reply, Nine issued a memo written by Tory Maguire, then executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, and signed by then Age editor Patrick Elligett, SMH editor Bevan Shields and national editor David King. The memo cautioned journalists that “personal agendas” should not influence reporting.

The principle, Maguire wrote, meant that “any newsroom staff who signed this latest industry letter will be unable to participate in any reporting or production relating to the war”.

Guardian staff received a similar message from the editors of its Australian, US and UK organisations: Lenore Taylor, Betsy Reed and Kath Viner. The memo explained that staff “should not sign public petitions or open letters about matters that have, or could be perceived to have, a bearing on [the publication’s] ability to report the news in a fair and fact-based way”.

Maguire, Shields and King had previously travelled to Israel on “study trips”; so had Taylor. A petition calling for fair cover for Palestinians created a perception of “bias” – but accepting free travel and accommodation from Israel or pro-Israel groups did not.

Double standards

Such double standards foster allegations of a media “captured” by pro-Israel lobbyists, a claim that can degenerate into antisemitic conspiracism. Johnson’s book rests on a much better analysis, one that centres US rather than Israeli power.

Three decades ago, secretary of state Alexander Haig provided a simple explanation of why Tel Aviv mattered so much to Washington. “Israel,” he said, “is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American solider, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”

Since the 1970s, the US has looked to Israel to protect American interests in the oil-rich Middle East. To equip Israel for that function, the US provides more cumulative foreign aid to Israel than any other nation: since 1948, more than US$300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total.

Most US support, particularly in recent years, pertains to defence. The majority of Israel’s air force and all of its combat aircraft are made in the US. The analyst William D. Hartung estimates that, since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, the US government has provided Israel with US$21.7 billion of military aid.

If we recognise America’s strategic reliance on Israel, we are better positioned to understand the liberal response to Gaza, which also needs to be seen in the context of Trumpism. During the first Trump administration, many progressive institutions ostentatiously signalled their opposition to a presidency they considered illegitimate and anomalous.

Johnson notes that, when the killing of George Floyd in 2020 spurred a revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, “media outlets, cultural nonprofits, and colleges issued lofty – if vague – statements of support for racial justice”. These were low-stakes anti-Trump gestures that aligned mainstream liberals with what they saw as the imminent restoration of progressive normality.

Support for Ukraine was equally easy. Unlike Palestinians, Ukrainians were, after all, understood by the Western media as civilised. In the London Telegraph, pundit Daniel Hannon spelled out why Ukrainian suffering resonated in the West: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking.” In 2022, CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata explained (in remarks for which he subsequently apologised) that Ukraine was not “a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades”; it was “relatively civilized, relatively European”.

Johnson shows that, in the period he surveyed, the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, USA Today and Axios collectively used the term “savage” 16 times for the killing of Israelis, but never for the killing of Palestinians.

Likewise, “slaughter” appeared 120 times in relation to the killing of Israelis, but only once for Palestinians. “Massacre” was used 344 times in relation to Palestinians killing Israelis, but never for Israelis killing Palestinians. “Barbaric” was used 14 times to describe the killing of Israelis, but zero times in relation to the deaths of Palestinians.

The cable coverage displayed a similar pattern. Johnson records that on MSNBC, presenters and guests used “massacre” 177 times, “barbaric” 46 times, “savage” 23 times and “slaughter” 102 times in relation to Israeli deaths. They never called the killing of Palestinians “barbaric” or “savage”. In relation to Palestinians, they only used “massacre” eight times and “slaughter” four times.

References to “savagery” and “barbarism” echo the logic of settler colonialism, identifying the uncivilised natives as a problem to be solved.

The sphere of deviancy

By denouncing Putin’s invasion, liberal politicians and institutions were opposing a traditional US adversary. They were siding with the incoming Biden administration and most Western nations. And they were distancing themselves from an increasingly unpopular Trump, widely seen as sympathetic to Russia.

After October 7 2023, the calculus changed. Unlike a stance on Ukraine, opposition to Israel’s war was not cost-free. Hostility to the longstanding foreign policy consensus required a modicum of courage. In the terms established by Daniel Hallin’s famous study of the US media and Vietnam, The “Uncensored War” (1986), those who opposed Israel’s war stepped outside the “sphere of consensus” and the “sphere of legitimate controversy” to inhabit the “sphere of deviancy”.

This is a space occupied, in Hallin’s words, by “those political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of the society reject as unworthy of being heard”.

Not surprisingly, as Johnson explains, institutions that had previously backed Black Lives Matter, the people of Ukraine and other popular causes “found both their tongues and hands tied on the subject of social justice as the death toll in Gaza skyrocketed”.

In 2022, Harvard president Lawrence Bacow proclaimed his institution’s solidarity with Ukraine with a rousing speech. “Now is the time for all voices to be raised,” he declared:

The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people and undermine the concept of sovereignty. Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation of human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression […]

Today the Ukrainian flag flies over Harvard Yard. Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine.

By 2024, Harvard had changed its mind. The time for raising voices had, apparently, come to an end. In the face of student protests, Harvard announced it would “no longer take positions on matters outside of the university”.

Johnson notes that 50% of the top US colleges – including Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, University of Michigan, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Dartmouth and UCLA – issued statements of support either for Ukraine and/or for Israel in February 2022 and October 2023.

Then, as the Gaza crisis intensified, they suddenly explained they couldn’t take stands on political issues.

Third partying

The media, however, had to say something. In 2016, progressive outlets in the US had portrayed Trump as something akin to a fascist. In 2020, they had campaigned, more-or-less openly, for the Democrats. Even sober publications such as the New York Times made clear their preference for Joe Biden: a sensible centrist who would restore decency and democracy. Not surprisingly, in 2023, the Gaza genocide – and Biden’s complicity with the killing – created a tremendous ideological crisis for the liberal media.

Johnson notes that Biden could have stopped the war at any time, citing multiple Israeli sources to that effect. In November 2023, for instance, retired Israeli major general Yitzhak Brick acknowledged that the Gaza operation depended utterly on the US:

All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability […] Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.

Michael Herzog, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, explained:

God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now’. It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.

Biden’s agency was rarely acknowledged by the mainstream media. Johnson describes the emergence of several distinctive styles of reporting that allowed “the average media consumer – and media worker – to cope with the undeniable and untenable war crimes being carried out by their leaders before their eyes”. A common trope involved what he dubs “Third Partying”. This entailed journalists framing the US “as a neutral party – even a humanitarian force – always looking (but, mysteriously, always failing) to end the conflict”.

Liberals depicted Biden as helpless. As the New York Times put it, the most powerful man in the world was supposedly constrained by the “limits of US influence in the Mideast”. They wrote stories about what Johnson calls “Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden”, in which the president featured as “secretly upset, outraged, having stern words for Netanyahu, or privately sad or anguished about civilian casualties”.

We might think about these tropes in relation to journalism professor Jay Rosen’s work on the professional socialisation of political journalists into what he describes as the “savvy style”. Rosen explains:

In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)

Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it”, and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are.

In relation to Gaza, savvy commentators recognised (though not necessary openly) the US reliance on Israel to maintain hegemony in the Middle East. Savviness meant understanding the political consequences of that relationship: namely, that US politicians would back Israel under almost every circumstance.

The Australian situation

Though the Australian situation is different, certain parallels can be identified.

The Albanese government came to power in 2022 with considerable support from a liberal media impressed by Labor’s aura of competence, particularly in contrast to the shambolic Morrison administration.

As a backbencher, Anthony Albanese had spoken at rallies to denounce the IDF for meeting “children throwing rocks with helicopters, with tanks and with missiles”. But as prime minister, he and his foreign minister Penny Wong sought, above all else, to strengthen the US alliance as a counter to an increasingly confident China. In relation to Gaza, Australia determinedly followed the US lead.

The tropes identified by Johnson appeared, in slightly modified form, in the Australian liberal press. For instance, after Greens leader Adam Bandt’s defeat in the seat of Melbourne during the federal election in May 2025, Nine’s David Crowe explained that Bandt had lost in part because he had:

seized on the war in Gaza to accuse Albanese of knowingly aiding Israel in a genocide. There was no such support for genocide; the Australian government wants a ceasefire and a two-state solution. Most importantly, most Australians knew their government did not have the power to stop the war. The Greens leader was eyeless in Gaza, blind to the danger for him and his party.

Crowe was right to say that an Australian prime minister lacked the power of a US president to stop the war. But Bandt had never suggested otherwise. Instead, the Greens – like many others – had insisted that abstract calls for a ceasefire and a two-state solution (an outcome that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to oppose) meant nothing unless accompanied by what Bandt called pressure from “real, concrete steps”, such as an end to military trade, the imposition of sanctions and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador.

Symptomatically, in his condemnation of Bandt, Crowe does not reject his description of the war as genocidal. Instead, he presents Bandt’s response as an electoral misfire by the Greens. “Young voters may be drawn to its exaggerated rhetoric and confected conflict,” he concludes, “but voters trend to drop the party as they age.”

We might again recall Jay Rosen. “Prohibited from joining in political struggles,” he writes,

dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passion, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit. The savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you. They say: I am closer to reality than you.

Throughout the liberal media in Australia, the question of Gaza often manifested as a tension between employees and management. In November 2023, for instance, the Australian Financial Review reported on a meeting by the staff of Schwartz Media, publisher of the Saturday Paper, at which editor-in-chief Erik Jensen addressed concerns about the paper’s response to the Gaza crisis.

As far back as 2021, Alex McKinnon, the one-time morning editor of the Saturday Paper, identified what he called “an unofficial but widely known editorial policy of avoiding coverage of Israel and Palestine, especially any coverage that could be perceived as being critical of the Israeli government’s ongoing human rights abuses of Palestinians”. Many staff members, said McKinnon, “expressed discomfort with it, but all seemed resigned to it”.

In response to McKinnon, Jensen rejected claims of a pro-Israel bias. He said the same in the 2023 staff meeting. Yet, as the staff reportedly argued, the Saturday Paper had previously distinguished itself with overt stances on other progressive causes, such as refugee rights and climate; it campaigned, through the dogged reporting of Rick Morton, for justice over the Robodebt scandal.

On May 21 2022, the Saturday Paper called for the defeat of Scott Morrison in the federal election, saying Morrison “will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the country’s great torturer”. On April 8 2023, the paper attacked Peter Dutton’s stance on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, saying his “cynicism is boundless” and calling him an “ugly person who makes true the old joke about politics and show business”. The editorial accused him of dividing the country with his “ghoul politics”.

Elections and Indigenous reconciliation are important issues. But so is genocide. Had the Saturday Paper applied the same editorial focus to Gaza, it might have published something like this:

How will history regard the government of Albanese, Chalmers, Marles and Wong? It will record that after two and half years of genocide by Israel, Australia’s leadership invited Israel’s president for a state visit. Australia refused to condemn the raft of war crimes committed by Israel and supported by the United States, first in Gaza and then in Iran and southern Lebanon. […]

Australia has said nothing while Israel has continued to assassinate journalists, medics, aid workers, diplomats, foreign and spiritual leaders across the Middle East. Worse, it has done nothing even to dissuade Israel – no sanctions, no calls for justice or statements of support for the ICC arrest warrants, not even stopping our arms trade to Israel.

This passage was written by Nick Feik, the former editor of Schwartz Media’s magazine the Monthly, but it didn’t run in the Monthly or in the Saturday Paper. It appeared on Feik’s personal Substack.

Alternative platforms

That’s symptomatic of a growing trend in which writers horrified at the genocide are, either by choice or necessity, publishing on alternative platforms rather than the established liberal outlets. Robert Manne has long been acknowledged one of the most important public intellectuals in Australia. Remarkably, if you want to read his thoughtful comments on Gaza, Bondi and antisemitism, you must turn, not to any of the mainstream papers, but to his Substack.

Rick Morton, who spearheaded the Saturday Paper’s coverage of Robodebt, posted his thoughts on Gaza and the Bondi massacre on Ghost, a Substack alternative, in January 2026. He quit his job at the Saturday Paper shortly afterwards.

Alex McKinnon established a Substack to report “what others won’t about Australia’s silence on Palestine”; he later launched Deep Cut News with Antoun Issa, who resigned from the Guardian in 2024 “due to objections over the outlet’s coverage of the Gaza genocide”.

Antoinette Lattouf – who won a high-profile legal case against the ABC after it sacked her for sharing a post from Human Rights Watch about Gaza – now works with Jan Fran making podcasts and YouTube shows for their own Ette Media.

Scott Mitchell and Osman Faruqi, who both worked for Schwartz’s 7am podcast (as well as various other outlets), collaborate on the news platform Lamestream.

The proliferation of new outlets and the rejuvenation of older ones, such as Overland, has led to important interventions. The Klaxon, a project of investigative journalist Anthony Klan, doggedly pursued the ties between John Roth, the husband of antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal, and the far-right Advance project. Deep Cut News published the letter in which a pro-Israel academic group lobbied to exclude Abdel-Fattah from the Bendigo Writers Festival. Lamestream broke the story about UQP’s cancellation of Jazz Money’s book.

Yet good journalism does not, in itself, guarantee the survival of the outlets who conduct it. The mass street movement in support of Gaza created a new audience for alternative publications. But with the establishment of a ceasefire (though not a genuine peace) the protests have declined, creating a difficult environment for media projects challenging the liberal consensus.

Legal ramifications

In the US context, Johnson doubts that the progressive outlets that supported the genocide will pay much of a short-term price. On the contrary, he identifies a process of rationalisation and justification already underway. Insofar as liberals apportion blame, they attribute it to Netanyahu and what they see as an unfortunate overreaction by the IDF to the barbarities of Hamas. He concludes:

Mostly, I think the genocide in Gaza will be put into a memory hole, forgotten, dismissed as a lefty ‘obsession’, or hung up, the disproportionate focus of which, it will be heavily implied, is evidence of latent antisemitism. And that will be that.

Nevertheless, the consequences of so much killing cannot be evaded entirely. The precedent set by the genocide will reverberate for generations, in the media and elsewhere. As Johnson notes,

we will likely see versions of Gaza play out in the coming decades across various peripheries […] And the model of deflection, dehumanization, and liberal excuse-making perfected during the Gaza genocide will be the template – the weapons, technological and rhetorical, having been sharpened over late 2023 into 2025.

The Gazafication of south Lebanon provides one immediate and obvious example, but there are others. The indifference to legal norms shown by Donald Trump when he greenlit the US and Israeli war on Iran reflected the experience of Gaza, where nothing said by the International Court or the United Nations or similar bodies made any difference at all.

Discussing Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, legal scholars Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro warn:

It is not just the existing international legal system that is in jeopardy now. At risk is the survival of any rules at all – and with them any constraints on the exercise of state power.

In that context, as historian Pankaj Mishra concludes, the

critique of the fourth estate, the so-called pillar of democracy, not only becomes more pertinent. It resonates as a broader analysis of the decay of democratic institutions in the West.

How to Sell a Genocide is part of that critique. But much more remains to be done.

Jeff Sparrow has signed statements of solidarity with Palestine and participated in campus campaigns against the genocide in Gaza.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is bankrolling the acquisition of a 9.5% stake in Southern Cross Media by Bruce McWilliam, who worked for Murdoch’s News Corp for nine years and is also a former Seven Network executive.

This venture is costing Rinehart $26 million. It does not buy her a direct stake in Southern Cross, but if McWilliam cannot uphold his side of a security deed he has signed with her, she could take control of it.

Southern Cross is one of Australia’s biggest media organisations. It owns the Seven Network, 7news.com.au, the Triple M and Hit radio brands, a raft of regional radio stations, and West Australian Newspapers.

The Rinehart-McWilliam-Murdoch axis is a formidable force, part of a new combination of media, political and mining interests, reminiscent of that which formed the Liberal Party in the 1940s. The other key figures are News Corp chair Lachlan Murdoch, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Liberal Party director Tony Abbott.

This is the lens through which it is instructive to assess the media’s coverage of One Nation’s rise since the Farrer byelection on May 9.

To see the parallels with the 1940s, we need to join a few dots.

Rinehart is a benefactor to Hanson. She recently bought her a light aircraft worth $1 million.

She is also a benefactor to Lachlan Murdoch. Her company Hancock Prospecting is sponsoring Sky News, owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation, to the extent of a little over $1 million for a Sky event in Dubbo called the Bush Summit.

Lachlan Murdoch is chairman of News Corporation. In 2023, he appointed Tony Abbott to the board of the News subsidiary, Fox Corporation, a day after Rupert Murdoch announced his retirement. In May this year, Abbott was elected unopposed as federal president of the Liberal Party.

Lessons from the 1940s

The parallels with the 1940s can be seen in volume two of Sally Young’s magisterial two-volume history of the Australia media, Media Monsters, where she describes the machinations that led to the formation of the Liberal Party.

The right was in disarray. Robert Menzies’ comically ill-named United Australia Party had been trounced by Labor at the 1943 election. In the aftermath, Menzies was re-elected leader but made it a condition that he had the right to form a new party.

He was backed by an entity called Collins House. This was a collection of companies connected by networks of powerful business figures who dominated mining and manufacturing. An influential figure was Lachlan Murdoch’s grandfather, Keith Murdoch. As managing director of the all-powerful Herald and Weekly Times (HWT) newspaper group, he provided a vital connection between the Collins House group and the most senior level of politics.

The HWT and other major media proprietors of the day anointed Menzies and his proposal for the new Liberal Party, at a dinner of Collins House magnates in Melbourne in 1944.

The difference between the political circumstances of the 1940s and those of today is that today there are two right-wing political parties contending for supremacy: the Liberal Party and One Nation.

Rinehart seems to be having a million quid each way on which will prevail. By contrast, if the recent coverage of One Nation by The Australian is any guide, Lachlan Murdoch has already cast his vote decisively for the Liberal Party.

The media sober up

For a fortnight after One Nation’s historic win in Farrer, the media, including News Corp media, were intoxicated by the attendant excitement and controversy: the shredding of Liberal Party support; Hanson’s ambition to be prime minister; the possibility of a Liberal-One Nation coalition.

Then, led by The Australian, the media began to sober up. On May 23, its editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, wrote that the Nationals, Liberals and One Nation were locked in a bitter competition with “life or death” consequences.

From that point on, The Australian applied the blowtorch of journalistic scrutiny to One Nation, and The Age and Sydney Morning Herald swiftly followed.

With its customary disregard for journalistic ethics, The Australian made a point of reporting that One Nation’s South Australian parliamentary team was looking like a “rainbow coalition”, one of its MPs having come out as gay with a partner who was an Indonesian Muslim.

But then it got into some serious public-interest journalism. For two days it pursued the party over its handling of rape allegations against an adviser, Sean Black.

It accused Hanson of shirking her parliamentary duties by being absent from 88% of Senate estimates hearings over the past decade. It also drew attention to the fact One Nation had failed to lodge audited financial records for three years in Queensland, and disparaged its policy proposal for citizen-initiated referendums.

On June 3 it drew on all this to publish a thundering editorial. One Nation was drifting further out to the fringes. It would be divisive and disruptive. It had appeared to lurch into blind confusion. Hanson was “not fit in any sense” for the role of prime minister.

On June 6, it led page one with a full-frontal attack, carrying the self-revealing headline: “Hanson hit”. It said Hanson had been caught out misleading voters, raising further questions about her capacity to be prime minister.

The Age and SMH were by then taking up the theme.

Suddenly Hanson was reportedly not sure if she would pitch for the prime ministership. She had admitted having had to close down party branches that had been “infiltrated by extremists”. She had insisted she would not be influenced by Rinehart despite having adopted one of Rinehart’s key policies. In other words, she was all over the place.

On June 6, the papers’ political and international editor, Peter Hartcher, described her as a firebrand provocateur who specialises in grievances without solutions and turns to scapegoats instead – Asians, First Nations people, Muslims. He pointed out that Hanson had answered “no” when asked by another journalist whether she could think of any error that Donald Trump might have made since taking power.

The same day another Age/SMH commentator, Paul Sakkal, wrote about what he called the collection of right-wing forces barracking for Hanson: openly white supremacists, people who rallied alongside neo-Nazis, supporters of the so-called sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman, who had killed two policemen. “A serious governing party cannot retain these relationships.”

A right mess

The big question after all this is how the forces brought together through the new media-politics-mining combination will resolve the obvious tensions involved in creating an effective force on the right of Australian politics.

Murdoch, through The Australian, has clearly signalled his contempt for One Nation, and already has Abbott on his team through Fox Corporation.

Rinehart, with her substantial holdings via McWilliam in Southern Cross Media, could go either way: backing Hanson or the Liberals. And her record indicates she would use her power to influence editorial decision-making to support her choice.

In 2012 she became the largest shareholder in the Fairfax company, with 14.99%. However, she refused to sign the company’s charter of editorial independence, and as a result was refused a seat on the board. She sold out in 2015.

Her history in refusing to sign the Fairfax charter is a strong indicator she would want the option of using her position on any media board to influence editorial decisions.

The old Fairfax newspapers, The Age, the SMH and the Australian Financial Review, are now owned by the Nine Entertainment Company, and stand outside the new cabal. A crucial question is whether they might prove to be a countervailing force.

One Nation set off this earthquake in Australian politics, but how the media play into the aftershocks will be a significant factor in the shaping of the new landscape.

Correction: this article originally referred to Gina Rinehart as “billionaire heiress to the Lang Hancock mining empire”. This has been amended to “mining billionaire”.

Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Global society makes billions of images and uploads hundreds of thousands of hours of video on the internet every day.

The problem is, some of this content is misleading or downright wrong. And when it’s in visual form, it can be particularly convincing.

Take the Met Gala that happened earlier this month in New York. While photographers snapped photos of Rhianna, Beyoncé and Nicole Kidman as they strutted their stuff, others saw “photos” of celebrities, such as Rosalía, Lady Gaga and Jacob Elordi, who were actually elsewhere (the images in the below Instagram carousel are AI generated).

While this type of AI slop might seem harmless and can be easily verified, other “media fakery” is becoming far more problematic and demands more robust techniques to verify.

Traditional verification techniques are falling short as AI becomes increasingly convincing and the line between authentic and synthetic blurs. This is true across all content, from still images to moving ones and audio deepfakes.

The volume of content and the speed at which it travels doesn’t help. It also doesn’t help that fact-checking can take hours or days while fakes can be created in seconds.

First, equip yourself

Guides on detecting AI-generated content suggest multiple strategies and acknowledge there are no perfect solutions. But there are helpful things you can do.

Familiarise yourself with examples of fakes and study how they were fact-checked. This helps you understand what is possible and learn how fact-checkers sort real from fake.

Look deeply. Zoom in. Pause the content or watch it frame-by-frame. Inspect the small details. Look out for inconsistencies, textures that are flat when they shouldn’t be, or patterns that are too perfect or are inexplicably off. Does the location shown match with where the scene is purported to be? Do shadows fall naturally and do lines follow the rules of perspective?

Look widely. Are you familiar with the source? What else does it publish and how long has it been around? What do other trusted sources say? How does this depiction compare to others that are available? Or if there aren’t others available, should that give you pause?

Then, apply your learnings

Let’s take an example and work through it together.

This Facebook reel, posted by an account called “Real Talk Hub”, purports to show migrants being stopped and returned by Australian police at an airport.

Before getting too granular, let’s take stock of the opening image.

The video uses scale to show what appears to be a long stream of passengers. Some are moving toward and some are moving away from a plane. It is difficult to identify specifics in the video. The superimposed text blocks almost all of the horizon line. Shallow depth of field makes aspects in the distance blurry and hard to discern.

Many of the passengers have darker skin and are visually coded as “other”. They interact with a light-skinned police officer who takes notes on a clipboard.

The vertical video is framed carefully to not reveal identifiers like the name of the airline that seems to start with the letter “P”. This makes it difficult to search the airline’s name and whether credible sources corroborate the story that’s told.

Even though the people and scenes look realistic at first glance, the video’s integrity unravels when we slow down and look closer. People in the passenger line morph and transform.

The officer is able to single-handedly remove the paper from the clipboard and it appears to inexplicably leave white strips behind. The police vests look different to images you can find in verified media photos of the Australian Federal Police.

Taken together, all these clues suggest the video is AI-generated.

Think like a fact-checker

Many AI-generated videos can trick you and create a very compelling narrative. So, fact-checkers have developed triangulated methodologies that examine elements beyond just what you see in the video.

One way to do this is to systematically check contextual factors – the other things surrounding the content. Our team’s research has found professional fact-checkers usually pay attention to the type of social media accounts or websites distributing suspicious media.

For this AAP verification on a video about banning dogs on the beach, it was crucial to inspect the user’s activity and posting patterns.

In addition to visual anomalies, the fact-checkers also found an invisible watermark that helped them determine the content was AI-generated.

Other things to check are how long a social media account has been operating, how often the social media account posts, and whether the account is transparent about its use of AI.

These aren’t fool-proof indicators of authenticity, though. The migrant example above comes from an account that is about five years old. It also comes from a “verified” account, which might make it feel more credible. But both Facebook and X now let users pay for this verification.

Overall, when it comes to suspect images or video, don’t just look deeply. Also look widely.

AI-generated content can increasingly fool our eyes, so you also have to look beyond what’s in the video. Taking a mixed-methods approach that considers visual and contextual clues can help. By training your ability to think like a fact-checker, you can stay safer online.

Read more: We teach young people to write. In the age of AI, we must teach them how to see

Silvia Montaña-Niño is also associate investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society and the Fact Check Research Team at this centre.

T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.