Corporate Media Covers AI as a Contest of Elites. In That Framing, We All Lose.

Corporate news outlets frequently frame stories about artificial intelligence (AI) as contests. The most basic version of this frame — metaphorical “races” between rival tech companies or nations, in which speed of innovation is presumed to determine the victors — is so widely used, it’s easy to take for granted.

As AI systems shift power throughout society, from health care and law enforcement to education and marketing, frames premised on contests or races distort, marginalize, or even erase fateful power dynamics. Reporting that represents AI tech development primarily as a contest among elite rivals typically buries questions about how new technologies are likely to impact the general public. The recommendation of journalism professor Jay Rosen holds true: Informative reporting highlights “not the odds, but the stakes.”

The recent coverage of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against his former business partner Sam Altman and OpenAI exemplifies the problems with framing AI developments primarily as contests among rival elites, in which the majority of the public are bystanders whose only choice is to start using AI or get left behind.

Trial Coverage: “The Landing of the Hindenburg on the Deck of the Titanic”

Established in 2015 by Altman and Musk, OpenAI claimed that its mission was to develop tech that would benefit “all of humanity.” In October 2025, OpenAI announced a new for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation. The move, The New York Times reported at the time, “firmly establishes OpenAI as one of the tech industry’s standard-bearers in the AI boom, allowing the San Francisco company to compete on more solid footing with giants like Google, Amazon and Meta.”

In his lawsuit, Musk contended that Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, enriched themselves by betraying OpenAI’s founding mission. For its part, OpenAI characterized Musk’s lawsuit as an attempt to set it back while Musk sought to fortify his own struggling AI startup, xAI.

The nation’s major national news outlets provided day-by-day trial coverage, which regularly characterized Musk and Altman as “titans” and the case as a “blockbuster.” On the eve of the trial, one expert source told The Washington Post, “We are about to witness the landing of the Hindenburg on the deck of the Titanic.” (The examples of news framing cited here are drawn from a sample of 104 news articles about the lawsuit, identified using ProQuest’s U.S. Major Dailies archive.)

Heaps of subsequent coverage focused on the two larger-than-life protagonists’ personalities, the power struggles between them, even the clothes they wore to court — and the market stakes for OpenAI and xAI.

Acknowledging the “billions of dollars and the future of the A.I. industry at stake” in the lawsuit, The New York Times highlighted another reason the trial mattered: “It has given an up-close-and-personal look at how two men worth more than a combined $670 billion function under extreme pressure.”

“What happens in the weeks and months to come will define Altman’s legacy,” one Wall Street Journal article asserted. At the trial’s conclusion, The Washington Post quoted a corporate litigation lawyer: Altman had gone “toe-to-toe with the world’s wealthiest man and won.”

When the jury and judge ultimately rejected Musk’s case — on the technical grounds that he’d waited too long to file — the Times described the judgment as “a major blow to Mr. Musk’s credibility and his effort to become a serious competitor in the artificial intelligence race.”

Overall, the coverage reflected the old (but still apt) insight that, for establishment news media, news is primarily about what powerful elites do and say.

Outside the Frame: Omitted Issues, Missed Opportunities

“This is not a trial on the safety risks of artificial intelligence,” Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told Musk’s lawyers on the trial’s opening day. “We aren’t going to get into those issues.”

Neither did the establishment press covering the case. Consequently, the coverage missed opportunities to serve the public good in at least two ways.

First, despite an obsessive focus on the power dynamics between Musk and Altman, corporate news coverage of the trial almost never addressed the broader issue of how new AI-powered technologies are shifting power across social, economic, and political spheres.

Although such coverage frequently asserted that the case would “shape the future of artificial intelligence” — a passing nod to Rosen’s “not the odds, but the stakes” — little to none of it actually examined whose futures hung in the balance. The breadth and speed of AI tech developments are challenging independent researchers to develop new analytic tools to measure the increasing power disparities, which threaten to undermine any democratic, transparent development or use of AI-powered systems.

But existing research has already established that those systems amplify existing inequities and mask injustices, due to prevalent but faulty assumptions about the objectivity of AI systems. A 2023 risk assessment of generative AI and journalism found that concentrated corporate control of AI systems ripples out to other domains of society, potentially undermining public trust in information, devaluing human labor, and degrading the environment. Thus, even as a boom in construction of data centers threatens scarce water sources and drives fossil fuel extraction and pollution, the algorithms they power routinely distort the news, erase marginalized groups, and promote a dangerous sycophancy, in both politics and peoples’ personal lives.

As if the judge’s admonition to Musk also applied to them, the corporate press covering the trial “just weren’t going to get into those issues.” One rare exception was a New York Times report that quoted Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute, who quipped that AI is “less regulated in America than sandwiches,” and warned that, absent meaningful regulation, “Trials are all we have right now.”

Second, and perhaps predictably in light of the first omission, establishment coverage of the trial missed opportunities to show how, outside the Oakland courtroom, journalists and ordinary people can potentially have a say in AI’s development and application. This omission reflects a recurrent pitfall in AI journalism: coverage that narrowly reflects industry perspectives and interests. As Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan, authors of AI Snake Oil, point out, this exclusive perspective often goes hand-in-hand with unjustified optimism about the potential benefits of AI systems.

Three Resources for Better Framing — and Understanding — of Artificial Intelligence

These gaps in establishment news coverage of the Musk-Altman trial were especially glaring given the increasing availability of carefully vetted, practical guidance for better AI journalism.

The FrameWorks Institute has conducted surveys, focus groups, and interviews in an effort to understand not only how AI systems “replicate social systems of power” but also how we can galvanize public support for more just development and use of the technology. In “Framing the Social Implications of AI,” the Institute recommends practical principles of counter-framing that journalists, activists, and news audiences can use to influence public discussion about how AI systems “echo” existing biases and power structures, and to shift debate from a consumerist perspective to one focused on public good.

Likewise, Project Censored’s own Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists is a free, online repository of resources for journalists, including relevant questions to ask when reporting on new AI systems, directions for finding newsworthy sources outside industry, and news frames that serve public, rather than industry, interests.

Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists warns about reporters unconsciously adopting “horse race” frames from election campaigns to report on AI developments. A substantial body of research has established that “horse race” coverage of elections increases public distrust in both politicians and news outlets and ultimately leads to an uninformed public, as Shealeigh Voitl and I reviewed in an article for the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The same is true when reporters use contest or race frames to cover developments in artificial intelligence.

The journalists covering the Musk trial might also have benefited from new research by Trusting News, which reported in May 2026 that news audiences expressed increased trust in news organizations that share AI literacy content. Although the public has mixed feelings about artificial intelligence, Trusting News found that, after viewing just a single example of AI literacy content, even audiences with “low trust in news reported increased willingness to return to the news organization for information.”

The high-profile Musk-Altman trial provided news organizations with a clear opening to convey the promises, risks, and ethics of AI as a technology. Instead, the corporate press highlighted the moguls’ personalities and financial interests, substituting sensational hyperbole (‘the Hindenburg landing on the Titanic’) for informative analysis.

Lost in the pervasive framing of elite rivalry was a rich opportunity to explain the development of artificial intelligence as a matter of social power. Omitted altogether was any explanation of how, developed justly, the frequently touted “future of AI” might be harnessed for public good.