When the story is jobs, the coverage turns negative.

When the story is jobs, the coverage turns negative.

When Australian media writes about AI and jobs specifically, the tone is far darker than when it writes about AI more broadly. In our corpus of AI coverage, articles on the topic of jobs ran 87% negative in the first quarter of 2026. This is well above the negativity of AI coverage in general.

The fine print: Identifying sentiment (whether a piece is positive, negative or neutral) is the most reliable judgment in our media pipeline, one that human coders agree on closely. Classifying articles by topic is harder and carries more uncertainty, though "jobs" was one of the clearer categories to assign. Jobs n=52; non-jobs n=413.