This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Analyzing more than 43,000 English-language newspaper articles, a new study reveals a highly stratified narrative about AI in which the news media allocate authority unequally, reinforcing the technology's prominent role in contemporary life. The study, published in the International Journal of Communication, examines English-language newspaper sources in the United States and Europe through Dec. 31, 2024.
The final collection comprised 43,027 newspaper articles, including 9,684 from the U.S. and 33,343 from Europe. The authors used computational text analysis alongside interpretive examination of the articles. "The findings reveal a striking hierarchy in who is given visibility and authority in the story of AI," said Massimo Ragnedda, professor of media and communication at the University of Sharjah.
"The United States is predominantly positioned as a technological innovator and leader, and Europe as a regulator and normative evaluator." As for China, a leading AI power alongside the U.S., the authors note that Beijing "appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival associated with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat." Other actors, such as countries in Africa and Latin America, are largely absent from the narrative or positioned primarily as sites of implementation, risk or developmental need. Although AI is nearly omnipresent worldwide, the authors' findings reveal that the meanings the public associates with it—as reflected in thousands of news stories—are shaped by geography and language. "We conceptualize this pattern as discursive stratification," Ragnedda, the study's senior author, said.
He added that the power imbalance points to "an unequal distribution of narrative authority in which some actors are repeatedly positioned as legitimate authors and interpreters of technological futures, while others appear mainly as recipients, sites of implementation, or objects of technological change." Recent political economy scholarship views AI not simply as an unprecedented technological innovation with far-reaching consequences for human life, but also as a sphere marked by rivalries over power distribution, geopolitical competition and concentrated infrastructure. Beyond its technological capabilities, the research frames AI as an inequality regime in which communicative power, visibility, value and opportunity are redistributed through unequal linguistic structures of control. "Accordingly, we conceptualize news not as a mirror of technological change, but as a narrative infrastructure," the researchers note.
They describe that infrastructure as "a discursive and institutional system through which AI becomes publicly legible and some actors are positioned as innovators, regulators, threats, or absences." The findings shift the focus beyond AI's potential to transform the world—or even contribute to its annihilation—to another form of power: who gets to shape what this technology means. The study examines the global debate about AI in a nuanced light. According to Ragnedda, "AI does not simply determine what we talk about; it also helps determine who is recognized as having the authority to speak about the technology and whose futures are considered worth imagining." The study's analysis is not confined to AI as a technological infrastructure.
It also views the technology as a narrative infrastructure. "The stories repeatedly told about AI help shape perceptions of who leads, who regulates, who threatens, who benefits, and who remains largely unheard," Ragnedda said. The authors see broader implications in their findings.
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