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The appropriation of artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday workplace practices is becoming pervasive. Some of the industries that have seen the improved appropriation of AI include the automotive industry, food chains and other retail businesses. The media industry in developed countries has also been appropriating AI into newsrooms ecologies. This development has left news media workers, especially in developing countries, questioning the viability of their jobs in the foreseeable future as machines take over and disrupt newsmaking and production processes. The unknowns that come with AI adoption have been met with both utopian and dystopian views in African newsrooms, especially in countries that understand less on how to deploy AI affordances. Premised on the technology acceptance model and the concept of technological appropriation and a qualitative methodology that used structured interviews with community media journalists from the Western Cape province of South Africa, this chapter examined journalists' perceptions of AI deployment in the community media space. The findings of the study show that community media journalists hold both utopian and dystopian views on the utility of AI in the community media space. While most journalists perceive AI as enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of the newsmaking process, there is a significant number of journalists who perceive AI as inimical to the legitimacy and credibility of the profession. Furthermore, AI is also seen as a threat to jobs within the journalism profession. These findings resonate with previous studies that have shown that journalists are divided on the perceived utility of AI in newsrooms.

Efforts to make the television landscape more equitable for people of color have been evident both within and outside the industry as early as the 1940s. These advancements made by individuals within broadcasting were an attempt to allow more people of color to get opportunities to prove themselves competent in front of and behind the scenes in broadcast television. While these early attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, they laid the groundwork for future diversity initiative efforts. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the landmark events that introduced changes in diversity policy that eventually resulted from diversity initiatives at NBC despite the racial barriers within its corporate structure. This chapter will show that the trajectory of these early events exhibits that the diversity initiatives seen today resulted from decades of pressure from the government, the press and outside citizen activist groups.

When questioning the relationship between media, development, and democracy, especially in the ill-defined “Global South,” it’s important to go beyond the commonly held meta-narratives that frame these concepts as common sense. In a quest to investigate alternative characterizations of these terms, this chapter uses Ghanaian political economist Lord Mawuko-Yevugah’s (2014) theoretical framework of “developmentality” to explain how development has been used as an ideological instrument to promote the Western liberal media model in the “Global South.” Using a case study of Malawi, which is heavily dependent on foreign aid from the same countries who have defined and promoted this liberal media model aboard, raises important questions about a media model that is characterized by high objectivity and political neutrality on one side, but subjects countries to high levels of competition and free market principles on the other. By outlining the temporal sequence of events that have unfolded since the arrival of missionary media in the 1800s, the presence of international donors and the rise in non-governmental organizations, this chapter reveals how certain ideologies and practices have been legitimized through development to preserve the unequal balance of power between the “Global South” and their former colonial powers.