Abstract
As generative and predictive artificial intelligence (AI) systems become embedded across enterprise environments, mainstream business journalism plays a critical role in constructing the cultural and economic meanings of technological automation. This study investigates the discursive construction of AI and the future of work within Germany's premier financial and business press. Drawing on Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework integrated with Entman's framing theory, we examine a corpus of 348 news articles, editorials, and special reports published between November 2022 and October 2024 in Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and WirtschaftsWoche. The findings reveal a persistent hegemony of techno-deterministic and neoliberal economic frames that cast AI adoption as an unavoidable imperative for national industrial competitiveness. Simultaneously, linguistic analysis exposes systematic discursive strategies, including the agentification of technology, the nominalization of structural job elimination, and the passivization of the workforce. Labor unions and works councils (Betriebsräte) are largely marginalized or framed as friction points against modernization, challenging Germany's traditional co-determination (Mitbestimmung) consensus. We conclude that mainstream German business reporting predominantly serves as an echo chamber for corporate-managerial interests, naturalizing algorithmic workplace restructuring while obscuring its social and democratic ramifications.
