US and European newspapers cast the US as AI's innovator and Europe as its regulator

The corpus is lopsided. European papers supplied 33,343 of the 43,027 articles and US papers 9,684 ^[2]. That makes about 77.5% of the sample European, roughly 3.4 European articles for each American one ^[1]. The phys.org summary of the study does not report how often any frame appeared, or whether US and European papers framed the regions differently. With Europe at three-quarters of the sample, any pooled result leans toward the European press, including what it says about Europe ^[1].

The sample also limits the finding about who is missing. Every article is an English-language piece from a US or European newspaper ^[2]. Countries in Africa and Latin America are largely absent, or show up mainly as sites of implementation, risk or developmental need ^[8]. That describes the Western English-language press. Newspapers published in those regions were outside the corpus, and so was Europe's press in other languages ^[2].

"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 ^[3][5]. "The United States is predominantly positioned as a technological innovator and leader, and Europe as a regulator and normative evaluator." ^[6]

China is the case that pulls visibility apart from authority. The authors write that China "appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival associated with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat" ^[7]. It is named often and cast as a threat, so the hierarchy is about the role a country gets as much as how often it appears. Ragnedda said: "We conceptualize this pattern as discursive stratification" ^[9]. He described it as "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" ^[10].

The thing this doesn't tell you is whether the hierarchy goes beyond what the news agenda would produce anyway. The same summary calls China a leading AI power alongside the US ^[11]. Some of the imbalance could simply follow the industry: coverage of the firms building AI and the governments regulating it would quote those firms and governments. The authors combined computational text analysis with interpretive reading of the articles ^[4]. That design can map how 43,000 stories frame each region. Showing that editors, and not the geography of the industry, produced the pattern would take a baseline for each region's weight in AI.

Ragnedda framed the stakes more broadly. "The question is therefore not only who builds AI. It is who gets to define what AI means, and whose voice is missing?" he said ^[12].