The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is by Haoshuang Wang, and the focus is on how media organisations build professional authority. This is addressed here especially in the context of climate communication, in authoritarian contexts.
This can be addressed by combining theory on gradual institutional change and discursive legitimation; through this, we can understand discourse itself as an institution. Symbolic structures evolve in parallel to material ones.
This project works with 570 climate articles over a 24-year period, modelled using LDA and exploring semantic networks. The headline finding is that climate change as an anchor concept has remained stable, while ecological civilisation, carbon peak, and carbon neutrality have emerged rapidly as additional concepts towards the end of this period.
This shows concept drift, layering, conversion, and other processes. Regulatory, cognitive, and normative changes are all occurring, but coverage differs substantially; this has additive effects on the overall discourse.
