Journalists and experts: relationships shaping the public discourse of the pandemic

The relationship between journalists and experts has long been a topic of interest in science communication. Journalists use experts to add credibility and facts to their news stories, and many scientific experts see public commentary as a duty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between the two parties has grown stronger. They have shaped the public discourse of the epidemic, making decisions on the perspectives to emphasize, the information to rely on, and the stances to take regarding policy decisions.

While research on expertise and COVID-19 often focuses on (new) media representations and data, our research goes behind the scenes, focusing on how the public discourse of a crisis is built. Our research provides a qualitative analysis of the relationship between journalists and experts during the pandemic in Finland. By interviewing 14 key experts and 4 journalists, we have explored how they view their role in communicating the pandemic and what motivations and tensions occur between them. The interviewees were selected among the experts repeatedly visible in the media and journalists among active writers around COVID-19. Our research offers interesting frameworks and questions for future research in other contexts.

Our findings indicate that the relationship between journalists and experts proceeded from crisis mode to public disputes, which was reflected in the public discourse of the pandemic. In March and April 2020, experts and journalists were in unison with government officials, avoiding challenging them. This left, for example, the perspective of the elderly underrepresented, as the strong measurements of isolating the older population and nursing homes stayed uncontested in the public discourse. Control of the discourse during the crisis mode was in the hands of government officials, as both the news media and experts selected not to voice their critical viewpoints to avoid causing panic or communicational confusion. Unified communication was valued as one of the most important tools in pandemic prevention and control measures.

This stage was followed by several waves of public disputes, reflecting not only actual expert disagreement but also aggravations and inadequate background by the news media. This was partly caused by the self-criticism of journalists who felt that they had failed to serve the public during the seemingly unanimous crisis mode. At the same time, news media was also competing for public attention with forms of new media, where critical voices had been vocal already during the crisis mode. Most experts saw social media as a platform of disinformation considering the pandemic and avoided using it. They saw that news media had done their job of informing the public quite well, even though they criticized the confrontation built into many news stories. Some of them also seized the opportunity to gain visibility and research funding, serving as an example of both experts and journalists benefiting from their relationship.

Our findings suggest that the experts and journalists intensely collaborated, but concurrently with public disputes, tensions and different premises surfaced. They started to focus more on their own professional purposes and motivations, but also personal preferences on who to work with. News media renounced some of their definitional power during the crisis mode stage, taking it back during the public disputes. There were tensions both between experts and journalists, but also among their professions. For example, experts criticized other experts for epistemic trespassing and journalists criticized their managers for guidelines leading to sensational news stories. Despite the tensions between the institutions and ideals journalists and experts represented, the collaboration between individual journalists and experts stayed strong throughout the pandemic.

From our viewpoint, future research has two interesting directions to take from these results. The first is comparing the relationship between journalists and experts in different language areas, political systems, and media environments. Our research points out that these groups have tensions on two levels: individual and institutional. It would be interesting to see a more in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences in the tensions on these levels.