A ‘New Arms Race’? Framing China and the U.S.A. in A.I. News Reporting: A Comparative Analysis of the Washington Post and South China Morning Post

Abstract

This study explores the news framing of A.I., China, and the U.S.A. in two mainstream news outlets: The Washington Post and The South China Morning Post. The main objective is to analyse how both, as parts of different discourse cultures, portray the competition for leadership in A.I. innovation between China and the U.S.A. The study takes a critical look at the media discourse on the ‘new arms race’ and what role the news play in localising global technology trends. The empirical part makes use of a combination of manual and automated content analyses. To this end, a dictionary approach that utilises Names Entity Recognition was applied to a large volume of news texts ( N = 3.055) to identify recurring news frames. The findings show similarities in the perception of A.I.’s potentials and versatility but also clear cultural differences in how risks and conflicts are portrayed in both outlets. Although the Washington Post appears more critical about A.I., the South China Morning Post frames the technology as a driver of economic growth and global influence. The discussion offers a starting point for theorising the relationship between mediatisation, tech trends, cultural differences, and international politics.

The influence of artificial intelligence in higher education based on four thematic axes: a bibliometric study

“…However, the impact ratio is still higher for the United States (Table 2). It is no secret that two countries that represent the largest global economies, the United States and China, are today disputing hegemony in various ways, and technology and artificial intelligence do not escape this dispute (Saveliev & Zhurenkov, 2021;Nguyen & Hekman, 2022). Both have robust strategies and large investments (Lee, 2018) but specifically at the level of research impact if analyzed by metrics, the United States still seems to be in the lead.…”

Introduction: the stuff of African cities

“…An example may be helpful here: during the production of this special issue, our attention was also on the final stages of the construction of an elevated expressway that now extends 27 kilometres through downtown Nairobi. Its completion seemingly timed to coincide with the final stages of Uhuru Kenyatta’s presidency, and funded and constructed through a public–private partnership with China (see Nyabiage 2022), the expressway was about a lot more than facilitating the flow of traffic through the city. A wide range of actors, in shifting configurations, were responsible for bringing the expressway into being: engineers, authorities, project managers and publics, certainly, but also cement, steel, sand, machinery, water, labour, money, plans, advertising and many more.…”

“…This investment is to be recouped via toll charges over a planned twenty-seven-year period, after which management will be transferred to the Kenyan government. This public–private financial entanglement is of a scale currently without precedent in Africa (Nyabiage 2022).…”

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“…On the other hand, the state media also transmit the diplomatic performances in traditional avenues like Ministry of Foreign Affairs regular press conferences and the US–China diplomatic meetings in Anchorage, Alaska to Weibo, to show the “fighting spirit” of the Chinese diplomats. In other words, the diplomatic messages on social media like Twitter or Weibo are the result of the top-down agenda-setting behaviors of state-driven forces like media (e.g., Nguyen & Hekman, 2022) and diplomats themselves which appear to be the social media influencers in crafting message to feed their followers (e.g., Li & Feng, 2022).…”