Who talks about polarization and what effects does this talk have?

During his CAIS fellowship, Mike Farjam investigates how news construct polarization as a societal problem by assigning responsibility for it. The project maps (a) when and where “polarization” becomes salient, (b) who or what is blamed for intensifying divisions (e.g., parties, governments, media, social groups), and (c) which actors voice these attributions. Empirically, he will analyze a decade of reporting (2016–2025) on societal polarization from five major German outlets and trace changes across time, outlets, and political contexts. Methodologically, he will combine his previous research on LLM-enabled content coding with CAIS expertise in speaker/voice detection to identify blame targets and sources at scale, complemented by targeted manual validation. Results will inform debates on media responsibility and extened the project „Media and Polarization in Europe: How Journalism can support Democratic Debates“ for which he is co-PI (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation).