A new study just measured who holds AI narrative authority. Some countries get to define what artificial intelligence means. Most don’t get a vote.
Researchers analyzed 43,027 English-language newspaper articles from the US and Europe through the end of 2024. The paper, published in the International Journal of Communication, found a stark pattern in who gets AI narrative authority.
The United States is framed as the innovator and leader. Europe shows up as the regulator. China reads as a “hyper-visible but ambivalent rival,” tied to surveillance and geopolitical threat.
Africa and Latin America barely register. When they do, the study says, they appear mainly as sites of risk or “developmental need.” They aren’t treated as sources with their own view of the technology.
“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 and the study’s senior author.
Why Would a Miami Foundation Care?
That imbalance is exactly the gap the Knight Foundation has been funding newsrooms to close. It’s headquartered blocks from Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami.
Knight’s journalism program says AI is “reshaping how journalism is produced, discovered and sustained.” It funds groups helping newsrooms use AI responsibly, according to the foundation’s own funding page.
The foundation backed Partnership on AI’s “AI for Local News” initiative. The $3 million project aimed to close the gap between large national newsrooms and small local outlets. Those are often the outlets covering regions the AI narrative skips.
Knight’s approach reaches beyond its 26 legacy newspaper markets, into audiences the study says get little narrative authority.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s the same discursive stratification described in Ragnedda’s paper.
Who Gets to Define the Technology
Ragnedda frames the stakes beyond who builds AI. “It is who gets to define what AI means, and whose voice is missing,” he said.
That question isn’t abstract in South Florida. Miami sits as the US gateway to Latin America. That’s the same region the study calls “largely absent” from AI’s narrative. It’s also where many Miami companies build, hire and sell every day.
A publication like this one exists partly to close that same gap. Miami AI coverage rarely counts as global narrative authority in a study built from US and European datasets. It sits closer to Latin America than most US AI newsrooms do.
The researchers describe news coverage itself as “narrative infrastructure,” not just a mirror held up to technological change. Framing choices decide who counts as an authority and who counts as a subject.
Applied literally: an American AI lab gets to explain its own technology’s risks. A Brazilian or Nigerian newsroom covering the same technology’s local effects gets filed under “developmental need.”
What Changes Because of It
None of this is a call for AI coverage to soften on China, or Silicon Valley labs, or U.S. regulators. Ragnedda’s team isn’t arguing the hierarchy is wrong on the facts. They’re arguing it’s incomplete.
Knight’s own bet funds smaller and international newsrooms building their own AI capacity. That’s one concrete attempt to widen the circle, not just describe it.
The study closes without prescribing a fix. Ragnedda’s own framing is a question, not a solution: whose voice is missing from the story of AI, and who decides.
