The study examined English-language newspaper sources from the United States and Europe up to December 31, 2024, assembling a final corpus of 43,027 articles, of which 9,684 came from the United States and 33,343 from Europe. The authors combined computational text analysis with interpretive examination of the corpus, a methodological pairing that allowed them to detect broad patterns of representation across a very large body of coverage while also reading individual articles closely for nuance. The scale of the dataset matters: with tens of thousands of articles spanning years of reporting, recurring patterns of framing and sourcing become statistically visible in ways that smaller samples cannot reveal.

What emerged from the analysis is what the researchers describe as a striking hierarchy of visibility and authority. Massimo Ragnedda, professor of media and communication at the University of Sharjah and the study’s senior author, said the findings reveal that the United States is predominantly positioned as a technological innovator and leader, while Europe is cast as a regulator and normative evaluator. In this symbolic geography, America supplies the vision of the AI future and Europe supplies the moral and legal guardrails, a division of narrative labor that mirrors but also reinforces real-world concentrations of technological and institutional power.

China’s position in the coverage is more complicated and more ambivalent. Although Beijing is a leading AI power alongside the United States, the authors found that it appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival, associated in the reporting with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat. In other words, China is never ignored—its AI ambitions receive enormous attention—but that attention is filtered through frames of suspicion and rivalry rather than through the celebratory innovation narratives routinely applied to American firms and researchers. Visibility, the study suggests, is not the same as favorable representation.

Most striking of all is who is missing. Countries in Africa and Latin America are largely absent from the narrative or positioned primarily as sites of implementation, risk, or developmental need. They appear, when they appear at all, not as authors of technological futures but as territories where other people’s technologies are deployed, where risks materialize, or where development gaps must be closed. The result is a global AI story told almost entirely from a narrow band of the English-speaking world, in which the majority of humanity figures as a backdrop rather than as a protagonist.

The researchers conceptualize this pattern as discursive stratification, a term meant to capture 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. The metaphor of stratification is deliberate: like geological layers, the media coverage sorts nations into tiers of narrative standing, with the top layers granted the authority to imagine and define what artificial intelligence will become, and the lower layers assigned passive or problematic roles in that unfolding story.

This framing draws on recent political-economy scholarship that views AI not simply as an unprecedented technological innovation with far-reaching consequences for human life, but as a sphere beset by rivalries over power distribution, geopolitical competition, and infrastructural concentration. The study extends that perspective into the realm of communication, treating AI as an inequality regime in which communicative power, visibility, value, and opportunity are redistributed through unequal linguistic structures of control. On this account, the struggle over AI is fought not only in laboratories, data centers, and regulatory agencies, but in the language used to describe the technology in the world’s most influential newspapers.

Central to the argument is a redefinition of what news does. The researchers conceptualize news not as a mirror of technological change, but as a narrative infrastructure—a discursive and institutional system through which AI becomes publicly legible and through which some actors are positioned as innovators, regulators, threats, or absences. Just as physical infrastructure such as undersea cables and semiconductor supply chains determines who can access and deploy the technology, this narrative infrastructure determines who can meaningfully participate in the public conversation about it. The stories repeatedly told about AI, the authors argue, help shape perceptions of who leads, who regulates, who threatens, who benefits, and who remains largely unheard.

The implications extend well beyond media criticism. Ragnedda notes that 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. If the public understanding of artificial intelligence is filtered through a narrow set of voices, then policy debates, investment decisions, and regulatory frameworks built on that understanding risk inheriting the same blind spots. The absence of African and Latin American perspectives, for example, means that questions of digital colonialism, labor exploitation in data annotation, and unequal access to AI benefits may be systematically underexplored in the outlets that most shape elite opinion.

The authors are nonetheless optimistic about the study’s contribution to the field. They write that it advances communication scholarship beyond descriptive analyses of representation toward a structural account of narrative authority in global media systems, showing how framing, sourcing hierarchies, and thematic emphasis combine to produce the symbolic geography of AI. Ragnedda distills the stakes into a single question: the issue is not only who builds AI, but who gets to define what AI means, and whose voice is missing. As artificial intelligence continues to reshape economies, security doctrines, and daily life, the study suggests that paying attention to the chain of dominance and dependence embedded in everyday news coverage may be as important as worrying about the technology itself.

Subject of Research: Discursive stratification and narrative authority in Western English-language news coverage of artificial intelligence

Article Title: Though seen as a threat to humanity, AI reporting in the West reflects a clear chain of dominance and dependence

Article References: Though seen as a threat to humanity, AI reporting in the West reflects a clear chain of dominance and dependence. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: artificial intelligence, media narratives, discursive stratification, narrative authority, news media, United States, Europe, China, Global South, computational text analysis, communication research, geopolitical competition

The study, conducted by Creso Sá, Aytaj Pashayeva, Christine Weidenslaufer, and Emily Gong of the University of Toronto, is based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with 17 administrators across three Canadian research-intensive universities. The researchers set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually happens inside universities when national research security mandates arrive on their doorstep? The answer, they argue, is an organizational form they call the embedded advisory model, and its details reveal a great deal about how universities absorb external demands that clash with their core values.

The context matters. Over the past several years, intensifying geopolitical competition, particularly between Western nations and China, has pushed research security to the top of the policy agenda in many countries. Canada has been no exception. The federal government introduced the National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships in 2023, followed by the Policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern, which restricts federal funding for research involving named sensitive technologies when researchers have ties to listed foreign entities. Provincial funders such as Ontario have issued their own research security guidelines, and agencies including the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the National Research Council have published guidance of their own. Universities suddenly found themselves responsible for implementing a dense and evolving web of requirements.

What the University of Toronto team found is that rather than creating new enforcement units, universities located research security within existing administrative infrastructures. Research security professionals were positioned as advisors who help researchers interpret federal and provincial requirements, coordinators who connect scattered offices across the institution, and translators who render dense government policy into workable practice. This design choice is not accidental. Universities are famously loosely coupled organizations, in which central directives often struggle to reach the laboratory bench, and the researchers argue that the embedded advisory model reflects a pragmatic reading of that reality.

The most striking finding concerns legitimacy. Research security introduces considerations that sit uneasily with established norms of academic science, including openness, international collaboration, and researcher autonomy. Security professionals cannot simply order scientists to comply; they must sustain cooperation through trust-building, researcher-oriented communication, and pragmatic support for funding success. In practice, this means framing security requirements not as bureaucratic impositions but as tools that help researchers remain eligible for grants, protect their intellectual property, and keep valuable partnerships alive. The advisors’ authority rests on usefulness rather than coercion.

This dynamic echoes a broader pattern documented in organizational scholarship. Studies of professional support staff in universities have long shown that new administrative functions gain standing with academics only when they demonstrate value to the research enterprise itself. The research security professionals in this study appear to have internalized that lesson. Their work involves what the authors describe as legitimacy-seeking: continuously demonstrating that security review is compatible with, and even supportive of, the scientific mission. Where earlier waves of university professionalization, such as research administration and quality assurance, followed similar trajectories, research security may be the newest member of that family.

The embedded advisory model also has a distinctive technical logic. By embedding security expertise within existing structures such as research services offices, universities avoid the reputational costs of a visible policing function while still ensuring that risk assessments, disclosure reviews, and partnership screenings occur before proposals are submitted. The professionals interviewed for the study described working across the entire lifecycle of a research project, from helping a researcher decide whether a collaboration triggers federal screening requirements to advising on how to document risk mitigation measures for a funding agency. This positions them as what organizational theorists call relational regulators, governing the gap between formal rules and everyday scientific practice through ongoing relationships rather than one-off inspections.

Yet the study is careful to identify the structural limits of this arrangement. The authors point to gaps in policy coverage, meaning that some research activities and funding streams fall outside the reach of current security requirements. They also highlight uneven federal-provincial coordination, since universities must reconcile requirements from multiple levels of government that do not always align. And they flag the risk of inconsistent application, both within and across institutions, when implementation depends heavily on the judgment and relationships of individual advisors rather than standardized procedures. An advisory model built on trust, in other words, may struggle to deliver uniformity.

These findings matter well beyond Canada. Comparable debates are unfolding across the OECD: the European Union has grappled with balancing openness against protectionism, Australia has been urged to make its research security ecosystem work smarter, and American universities have published catalogs of actions taken to address security concerns while scholars document the collateral damage of US-China tensions on scientific collaboration. The Canadian case offers a concrete organizational template, and a cautionary tale, for institutions everywhere that are being asked to securitize research without destroying the openness that makes science productive in the first place.

The study’s broader contribution is to shift the analytical lens from national policy design to administrative practice. Much of the emerging literature on research security focuses on what governments mandate; this paper specifies what universities actually build. In doing so, it speaks to longstanding concerns in higher education scholarship about how universities absorb external mandates and under what conditions new administrative functions gain standing with scientists. The embedded advisory model may be an imperfect compromise between security and academic freedom, but it is the compromise that research-intensive universities have chosen, and understanding it is essential for anyone hoping to predict how the global research system will evolve under continuing geopolitical pressure.

Subject of Research: Implementation of research security mandates through an embedded advisory model at Canadian research-intensive universities

Article Title: Organizing research security: the embedded advisory model in Canadian universities

Article References: Organizing research security: the embedded advisory model in Canadian universities. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01770-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01770-7

Keywords: research security, Canadian universities, higher education, research governance, science policy, academic administration, geopolitical competition, policy implementation, research partnerships, national security, university organization, advisory model