AI hype in journalism: Visibility, power, and the politics of media narratives

Summary

This editorial introduces a Digital Journalism special issue reframing AI hype as a systemic infrastructure that structures journalism — not just a discursive bubble or passing cultural narrative. Dodds and colleagues define AI hype as a set of exaggerated promises and anticipatory narratives that mobilize resources, redistribute legitimacy, and configure sociotechnical futures before those futures materialize. They argue that journalists occupy a contradictory dual position as both hype makers and hype watchers, and that hype is sustained through routine sourcing choices, professional anxieties, managerial pressures, and geopolitically inflected narratives. Rather than simply debunking hype, the authors call for “breakdown and repair” — making hype’s mechanisms visible so alternative futures become imaginable.

Key Contributions

• A working definition of AI hype as a structuring sociotechnical force rather than mere discourse, expectation, or bubble.
• A shift in the scholarly question: from whether AI hype is justified to how it functions — how it mobilizes resources and reconfigures labor in journalism.
• An integrated framework spanning communities of practice, recurring narratives, reach/scope, and breakdown-and-repair.
• An “infrastructural inversion” approach bridging journalism studies with STS infrastructure scholarship.
• Concrete recommendations: diversify expert sources, practice active reflexivity, and produce more critical scholarship on AI’s environmental, labor, and societal costs.

Methods

Editorial synthesis and theoretical framing of contributions to a Digital Journalism special issue. The authors draw on Star’s ethnography of infrastructure and Lave & Wenger’s community-of-practice theory, integrating empirical work from the issue — including ethnography of the Associated Press AI initiative, interviews with Chinese journalists, comparative content analysis across US, Dutch, Brazilian, German, Chilean, and African media, and analysis of media union responses to GenAI. Comparative historical analogies to Hyperloop and metaverse hype cycles further contextualize the argument.

Findings

• Newsroom actors strategically leverage AI hype to secure funding and legitimacy — e.g., rebranding existing automation projects as “AI” at the AP.
• Sourcing patterns shifted with the “AI” framing: from government officials/administrators in earlier automation reporting to tech executives once AI became the dominant frame.
• Metaverse coverage was largely uncritical (~11% critical framing), suggesting structural patterns recur across hype cycles.
• Journalistic discourse frames AI as “open-ended technological inevitability,” foreclosing questions about whether such futures should arrive at all.
• National framings diverge significantly: Chinese journalists adopt a “loyal-facilitator” stance aligned with state AI strategy; German coverage emphasizes “European values” against US/China competition.
• Hype renders invisible the hidden labor (annotators, moderators), environmental costs, and material infrastructures of AI — including the contradiction of “fully automated” systems requiring constant human supervision.
• Media union agreements on GenAI often use vague language that reproduces invisibility for marginalized media workers.

Connections

This editorial frames the conceptual terrain that empirical studies of AI discourse in journalism then populate — connecting closely to Stanusch2026-ec on how news coverage constructs AI narratives, and to Wang2025-zy on the production and circulation of AI imaginaries. Together these works trace how hype operates as both newsroom infrastructure and public-facing narrative system.

Podcast

A research-radio episode discusses this paper: Listen