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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 next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sally Boyani, whose focus is on discourse coalitions in global policy debates on the taxation of multinational companies. Such companies are well known for shifting profits to tax havens, costing countries billions of dollars. So far this has not been resolved, and various frameworks have been proposed to address this.

OECD-led frameworks historically have favoured developed countries, and it is unclear how actors dissatisfied with these approaches behave when such frameworks favour the interests of the developed world. International organisations play key roles …

The second speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jing Zhu, who begins by reintroducing us to the spiral of silence theory, and in this context asks what we mean by ‘opinion climate’: this is said to influence opinion formation and expression in individuals.

Contextual factors are critical in these processes, then, and one key such factor is stigmatisation. Some views are dismissed as representing low education or knowledge, gendered perspectives, or other aspects; this creates a fear of isolation, and may result in emotional arousal, limited expression efficacy, and other factors …

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 …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Henri Mütschele, who continues our focus on polarisation around climate movements. Polarisation research in the social sciences is still lacking in various ways: the role of media, the motives of individuals, the implications for social groups, and the impact on these groups strategic communication all still require further research, and such work is often focussed solely on explaining opinion change through conformity.

The law of group polarisation suggests that members of a deliberating group predictably move forwards a more extreme point indicated …

I am chairing the final session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town today, which is a partner association session on (de)polarisation featuring members of the German DGPuK, and we start with Rico Neumann. His interest is in the role of opinion leaders as potential agents of (de)polarisation of debates on climate change. Climate change debates tend to be highly controversial and depolarised in Germany and elsewhere, of course, and are also conducted across social media platforms and messaging apps; this enables both collective and connective action logics.

Climate discourse is highly emotional, polarised, and polarising, featuring …

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 …