Journalism, Media, and Artificial Intelligence: Let Us Define the Journey

Dear Colleagues,

We live in an information age and, ironically, meeting the core function of journalism, i.e., to provide people access to unbiased information, has never been more difficult. Herman and Chomsky conceptualized the “propaganda model” in their book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" (Herman and Chomsky 1988), ​"A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public". UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed, “at a time when disinformation and mistrust of the news media are growing, a free press is essential for peace, justice, sustainable development, and human rights” (UN News 2019).

Journalism has failed to achieve this goal of providing people access to unbiased information for a variety of reasons including, difficulties in maintaining media organizations' freedom and impartiality, funding challenges, and technology-induced disruptions to journalism. The lack of unbiased information for the public led to mistrust in governments and phenomena such as populism, partisanship, and kleptocracy prevailed.

We believe the core issues in expectations from journalism are related to the perception of the public that it is the responsibility of others, not themselves, to provide impartial information and good governance. Moreover, the world and information are increasingly complex requiring new methods for journalism.

This Special Issue calls for artificial intelligence (AI) based approaches for next-generation journalism and media with a particular focus on ways to improve access to unbiased information for everyone. This involves the development of AI-based approaches for the whole of the journalism lifecycle, news gathering, production, and distribution. AI is already being used in journalism, both academic research and industry though its use in AI is incremental and relatively limited, see, e.g., (Canavilhas 2022; Beckett 2019). Another related work is on deep journalism (Mehmood 2022; Ahmad et al. 2022; Alswedani et al. 2022; Alqahtani et al. 2022; Alaql, AlQurashi, and Mehmood 2022) that can make impartial, cross-sectional, and multi-perspective information available to everyone, can bring rigour to journalism by making it easy to generate information using deep learning, and can make tools and information available so anyone can uncover information about matters of public importance. We seek research articles and review papers in all these areas. Manuscripts that bring together research in computer science and communication sciences are especially welcome.

References

Ahmad, Istiak, Fahad Alqurashi, Ehab Abozinadah, and Rashid Mehmood. 2022. “Deep Journalism and DeepJournal V1.0: A Data-Driven Deep Learning Approach to Discover Parameters for Transportation.” Sustainability (Switzerland) 14 (9): 5711. https://doi.org/10.3390/SU14095711.

Alaql, Abeer Abdullah, Fahad AlQurashi, and Rashid Mehmood. 2022. “Data-Driven Deep Journalism to Discover Age Dynamics in Multi-Generational Labour Markets from LinkedIn Media,” October. https://doi.org/10.20944/PREPRINTS202210.0472.V1.

Alqahtani, Eman, Nourah Janbi, Sanaa Sharaf, and Rashid Mehmood. 2022. “Smart Homes and Families to Enable Sustainable Societies: A Data-Driven Approach for Multi-Perspective Parameter Discovery Using BERT Modelling.” Sustainability 2022, Vol. 14, Page 13534 14 (20): 13534. https://doi.org/10.3390/SU142013534.

Alswedani, Sarah, Iyad Katib, Ehab Abozinadah, and Rashid Mehmood. 2022. “Discovering Urban Governance Parameters for Online Learning in Saudi Arabia During COVID-19 Using Topic Modeling of Twitter Data.” Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 4 (June): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.3389/FRSC.2022.751681.

Beckett, Charlie. 2019. “New Powers, New Responsibilities. A Global Survey of Journalism and Artificial Intelligence | | Polis.” London. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2019/11/18/new-powers-new-responsibilities/.

Canavilhas, João. 2022. “Artificial Intelligence and Journalism: Current Situation and Expectations in the Portuguese Sports Media.” Journalism and Media 3 (3): 510–20. https://doi.org/10.3390/JOURNALMEDIA3030035.

Herman, ES, and N. Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. https://worldcat.org/title/17877574.

Mehmood, Rashid. 2022. “‘Deep Journalism’ Driven by AI Can Aid Better Government.” The Mandarin, 2022. https://www.themandarin.com.au/201467-deep-journalism-driven-by-ai-can-aid-better-government/.

UN News. 2019. “A Free Press Is ‘Cornerstone’ for Accountability and ‘Speaking Truth to Power’: Guterres.” 2019. https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/05/1037741.

Prof. Dr. Rashid Mehmood
Dr. João Canavilhas
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journalism and Media is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.