How the Pan-Arab Press Frames Journalism’s AI Future

This study examines how the pan-Arab daily press frames the future of journalism in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). Anchored in media framing theory, it asks which media frames are most salient in coverage (RQ1) and to what extent leading outlets differ in their framing (RQ2). A framing-based content analysis was conducted on 53 news items, features, and opinion pieces published in three influential dailies, Asharq Al-Awsat, Al-Nahar, and Al-Arab, coded with a theory-driven codebook comprising six themes and twenty-five codes spanning journalistic practice, economic and labour implications, ethics and credibility, audience experience, governance, and evaluative valence. The findings reveal a coherent master narrative: human-machine augmentation dominates the practice theme (47.1%), misinformation and deepfakes nearly monopolise the ethical field (69.8%), and calls for legal and regulatory frameworks overwhelm the governance theme (75.6%), while the overall evaluative tone remains contested between optimism (35.4%), pessimism (30.7%), and balance (29.1%). The three outlets converge on these master frames yet diverge in patterned ways: Al-Arab frames the AI future as a competitive threat demanding journalistic reskilling; Al-Nahar frames it as a business-model transformation entangled with trust, algorithmic bias, and press freedom; and Asharq Al-Awsat frames it as a manageable institutional adaptation.