And the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented by Matthias Kast and Martin Bürger, exploring the way that communicative AI technologies are being discussed in the German news media, with particular focus on the frames, actors, and topics.
New technology is often presented as either threat or progress, and various risk and progress frames can be defined here; a more general frame might also be identified. Their co-occurrence with actors and topics in communicative AI news coverage is also important to examine.
The study examined some 3,800 articles from 13 German newspapers between November 2022 and July 2024; building on a human reference sample of 460 articles this used an LLM to extend the analysis to the full dataset. Topics in articles were further identified through LDA topic modelling.
Key risk frames were information risk, general risk, and societal risk; progress frames covered technological, general, and societal progress. Most articles leaned to either risk or progress biases; with few articles containing an ambivalent or now framing. Actors were mainly industry and business and politicians; societal challenges, economic, work, and finance, and arts, culture, and media were major topics in all this.
Industry and economy actors often co-occurred with economy, work, and finance topics, and linked strongly to progress; political representatives and scientists were more often linked to risk frames. But ComAI coverage was not dominated by progress frames overall, and information and quality risk frames were prominent; this might also reflect the boundary work of journalists themselves. The strong occurrence of technological progress frames, by contrast, might be able to be explained by the prevalence of AI hype.
Media coverage continued to focus on a relatively small number of key actors, but private users of ComAI outside of professional contexts also appeared frequently. ComAI was connected to a wide range of topics, and quite a number of articles also fell into an explainer genre, fulfilling one key role of public-interest journalism. Overall, then, the coverage appears rather unbalanced, and this might be the result of journalists’ own incomplete understanding of this new technology and its implications for society.
