News Media, Narrative Authority, and the Global Ordering of Artificial Intelligence

This article examines how mainstream Western news media structure global hierarchies of technological legitimacy in coverage of artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI circulates worldwide, its public meaning is shaped within a restricted geopolitical and linguistic sphere. Conceptualizing news discourse as a narrative infrastructure that organizes visibility, authority, and technological futurity, we analyze 43,027 English-language newspaper articles from the United States and Europe using computational text analysis combined with interpretive examination. The findings reveal differences in thematic emphasis and actor representation: U.S. coverage frames AI through innovation and economic leadership, European coverage emphasizes regulation and governance, and China appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival associated with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat. Actors from Africa and Latin America are largely absent or positioned as sites of implementation, risk, or developmental need. We conceptualize this exclusion as discursive stratification: a hierarchy of narrative inequality in which some actors are positioned as authors of technological futures while others appear as objects, recipients, or peripheral contexts. News discourse thus contributes to the global ordering of technological authority.