Newspaper coverage of artificial intelligence: A perspective of emerging technologies

Abstract

The focus of the study is on how newspapers have covered artificial intelligence (AI) over the past decades. Analyzing 1776 news articles culled from four mainstream newspapers (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, and USA Today), the study examined the general landscape of media coverage as well as media framing of the topic through a mixed methodology (i.e., automatic content analysis and manual coding). Fourteen major topics (e.g., regulation & policy, risk & weapon) emerged from the accumulated articles. Furthermore, the study found that journalists have used different framing devices, including lexical compounds and argumentation patterns, to frame AI as a sophisticated, powerful, and value-laden issue. Also, different actors (e.g., research communities, governments, business sectors) combined to constitute a complex network in the media discourses.