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 surveys and Web tracking data on desktop and mobile devices; from this it is able to combine media exposure and survey results to trace potential media exposure effects. Key areas of focus here were aspects addressing the legitimacy, morality, and emotionality of climate protest movements.
Assessing attitude changes over four survey waves is difficult, however, due to attitude fluctuations and inconsistencies in the survey participation of individual participants. People saw Last Generation much more negatively than Friday for Future, and those attitudes did not change very considerably over time. Media use did not seem to have a particular impact here, which may be explained by the fact that media exposure to articles about these groups overall was very low.
Limited mainstream media exposure is unlikely to shift existing attitudes, then. Whether additional social media exposure might also have played a role would need to be studied through other approaches.
