Visualizations of AI in German news media coverage (2019)

We have conducted a quantitative visual content analysis of illustrated German national print media coverage on AI between January 1 and December 31, 2019. As news media titles, we chose six (leading) national quality newspapers and news magazines in Germany, namely: Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Die Welt (DW), taz, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit. All illustrated articles during the analysis period that contained the keywords ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘AI’[1] in their headline or subtitle (focus on articles that cover AI as a main topic) were selected for analysis. Our search resulted in 225 news articles, of which 127 were illustrated (56%) with n = 150 images in sum (some articles contained more than one image). For each image we captured formal categories (e.g. medium, publishing date, department, image genre etc.) as well as content categories. Per image, several image subjects (human, robot, computer etc.) with multiple specifying subcategories could be coded, for example if an image shows a human and a robot at the same time, as well as one image topic (again with multiple subcategories; e.g. man as role model, international competition, etc.).<br>[1] German search string: “Künstliche* Intelligenz” OR *KI*