Journalism

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Silva Heinonen, with a focus on harmful discourse on migration online. In Belgium, news media are frequently framing migration as a threat, use dehumanising language, and amplify populist and far-right policy responses. This creates negative emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety, and is further disseminated via social media platforms.

The effects of such content is often tested through single-exposure effect studies, which is problematic; on social media, effects are more likely to occur through repeated exposures, and will be also be dependent …

The second session on this final morning at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on framing and politics, and begins with a paper by Ying Qi Pan, whose focus is on media framing in the context of gender equality. This matters because media framing shapes how people understand social issues.

This often works through advantage or disadvantage framing, which respectively emphasise the systemic privilege of advantaged groups or highlight the underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups. Research to date focusses mainly on majority groups; there is relatively less evidence on the minority groups involved.

Gender is a salient …

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 …

The final day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a paper by Laura Liebig, exploring the German discourse around arms deliveries to Ukraine. She begins by outlining the issues around media criticism: such criticism is warranted at times, but can also be weaponised to elevate critics’ own positions and undermine trust in the media.

In Germany, critics have repeatedly accused mainstream media of one-sided coverage of arms support for Ukraine since Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion in 2022, and requested more viewpoint diversity. Such diversity is valuable in principle, and one of the …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Clara Schultz, presenting some of the results from the POLTRACK project on polarisation in the context of climate change debates in Germany. The specific question here is whether biased media portrayals of climate activists influence public attitudes towards such groups.

Negatively biased media cues may reinforce more extreme perceptions of climate protesters, or polarise previously neutral media users, while positive bias might produce backfire effects; neutral portrayals might also serve to depolarise more extreme attitudes.

POLTRACK studies this through a combination of multi-wave …

And the third speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Nayla Fawzi; she begins by noting that German society is not inherently polarised, but that certain debates – including climate change – serve as trigger points for polarisation. This does not necessarily question the existence of anthropogenic climate change as such, but certainly covers various preferences for whether and how to deal with it.

There are therefore also significant perceptions of polarisation on this topic in Germany; such perceived polarisation can be assessed by surveys of underlying feelings towards others’ positions, as …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jasmine McNealy, who addresses the threat of ‘dark news’: how are news audiences evaluating issues with the technical design of news sites? This moves away from a focus only on the quality of news content, and prioritises user-centred harms.

This addresses dark patterns: designs that manipulate user choices in order to favour the platform itself; as the economics of news have changed, news organisations have changed their Website designs in order to increase stickiness and extract valuable information from users. To what extent …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lucas Paulo da Silva, who reminds us that media outlets tend to chase large audiences. But can they do this across two ideological dimensions: economic and cultural? This might include left conservatives or right progressives, for instance.

Politically invested media actors tend to have very strongly correlated positions across issues, and so do party systems; if outlets are responsible to both economic and cultural dimensions, then this might make them less correlated over time, and this might also happen dynamically in response to …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Rupert Kiddle, whose interest is in encoder-produced news embeddings. This is an increasingly common technique, which helps analyse and categorise news articles both for internal journalistic purposes and for scholarly research. But they are not very sensitive to differences over time, and instead engage in a kind of temporal averaging of embeddings; this can be addressed, but remains difficult.

Most models also remain intransparent about their training data and weighting approaches, so there is a need to develop new approaches. This project draws …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Magdalena Wojcieszak, who is presenting work towards a news content quality classifier. The consumption of online news is diverse: people consume traditional news article,s blog content, YouTube news videos, news podcasts, and many different formats.

But how do we assess the quality of all this content? There are various different measures for this, and many of them are problematic, not least for their domain- rather than article-level assessments and their conflation of quality with ideological bias; some also include factuality and other features …