Professor Martin Löffelholz and his team presented a study on government crisis communication at ICA 2026 in Cape Town

Cape Town, June 8, 2026 — A team from the International Risk, Crisis, and Science Communication Research Group (iRisCS-Com) led by Martin Löffelholz presented new research findings on government communication during prolonged crises at the 76th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Cape Town, South Africa. The paper, titled “Government Public Relations in Prolonged Crises: Media-System Effects on News Values in Pandemic Press Releases. A Longitudinal and Cross-National Analysis (2020–2022),” was presented by Yi Xu, Martin Löffelholz, Deanna Sellnow, and Timothy Sellnow.

Audra Diers-Lawson and Bengt Johansson also contributed to the study. The research examined how governments and public health agencies communicated during the COVID-19 pandemic and to what extent media systems shaped the news values in official press releases. The analysis is based on 6,598 press releases published between January 2020 and December 2022 by 21 government and health institutions in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The study compared countries that can be classified into three central media system types: democratic-corporatist, liberal, and polarized-pluralist systems.

The study shows that governments and health institutions consistently used press releases during the pandemic to provide information of public interest. Across countries, the press releases frequently emphasized proximity, powerful actors, and action-oriented guidance. At the same time, differences between the media systems became apparent. In polarized-pluralistic systems, stronger sensory news factors were evident, while liberal systems placed greater emphasis on cognitive and behavior-oriented news factors. The longitudinal analysis also shows that news factors remained comparatively stable across the various pandemic waves. However, behavior-oriented news factors increased over time, while sensory, affective, and cognitive news factors declined slightly after 2021. These results suggest that governments adapted their communication strategies to the course of the crisis, the population’s changing information needs, and growing crisis fatigue.

The study contributes to a better understanding of communication in protracted crises. The findings underscore that effective crisis communication must capture attention, establish emotional relevance, foster understanding, and support concrete action. The authors argue that news factors are not universal. Rather, they are shaped by media systems, institutional communication styles, and audience expectations. Future research should expand the analysis to non-Western media systems, examine other protracted crises such as climate change, war, and migration, and compare government communication across different media platforms.

The study emerged from the DECIPHER project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Contact:

Professor (ret.) Dr. Martin Löffelholz
Ilmenau University of Technology 

International Risk, Crisis, & Science Communication Research Group
martin.loeffelholz@tu-ilmenau.de