Politics overwhelms science in the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from the whole coverage of the Italian quality newspapers.

Publisher: Public Library of Science Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101285081 Publication Model: eCollection Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1932-6203 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 19326203 NLM ISO Abbreviation: PLoS One Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science

COVID-19* ; Mass Media* ; Pandemics* ; Politics* ; Public Health*; Humans ; Italy ; Knowledge ; Social Media

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emerged as one of the most dramatic health crises of recent decades. This paper treats mainstream news about the current pandemic as a valuable entry point for analyzing the relationship between science and politics in the public sphere, where the outbreak must be both understood and confronted through appropriate public-health policy decisions. In doing so, the paper aims to examine which actors, institutions, and experts dominate the SARS-CoV-2 media narratives, with particular attention to the roles of political, medical, and scientific actors and institutions within the pandemic crisis. The study relies on a large dataset consisting of all SARS-CoV-2 articles published by eight major Italian national newspapers between January 1, 2020 and June 15, 2020. These articles underwent a quantitative analysis based on a topic modeling technique. The topic modeling outputs were further analyzed by innovatively combining ad-hoc metrics and a classifier based on the stacking ensemble method (combining regularized logistic regression and linear stochastic gradient descent) for quantifying scientific salience. This enabled the identification of relevant topics and the analysis of the roles that different actors and institutions engaged in making sense of the pandemic. The results show how the health emergency has been addressed primarily in terms of political regulation and concerns and only marginally as a scientific matter. Hence, science has been overwhelmed by politics, which, in media narratives, exerts a moral as well as regulatory authority. Media narratives exclude neither scientific issues nor scientific experts; rather, they configure them as a subsidiary body of knowledge and expertise to be mobilized as an ancillary, impersonal institution useful for legitimizing the expansion of political jurisdiction over the governance of the emergency.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Date Created: 20210520 Date Completed: 20210603 Latest Revision: 20210603

20221213

PMC8136646

10.1371/journal.pone.0252034

34015013