Abstract
SummaryFor public health promotion to succeed, popular support is necessary and the chosen policies and measures have to be perceived as legitimate by the public. In other words, health authorities need to build on and sustain established trust when they recommend a certain policy. When the policy is criticized, this trust is challenged, and the authorities enter into a negotiation of credibility (ethos). In this article, we research a particular instance of such negotiation, drawing lessons for health promotion and for COVID-19 communication. We study a Norwegian television debate in which an MD presented harsh criticism of the health authorities’ chosen crisis response in the early phase of the pandemic. Unpacking the rhetorical constitution of the expert ethos of the MD and of the health authorities, respectively, we find that representatives of the authorities are more open to participation and better at connecting to everyday experiences than the MD, who primarily builds her expert ethos on mastery of scientific language and methods, combined with alarmist rhetoric. Further, we identify main tenets of the public’s reception of the debate through an analysis of 1961 tweets that commented on the program. The analysis indicates that public health authorities might maintain high levels of trust by rhetorically cultivating their positions within institutional and (social) media networks of expertise.
Highlights
The importance of trust for the ability of a government to handle health crises can hardly be exaggerated, as has been emphasized in multiple studies of past crises (Deurenberg-Yap et al, 2005; Mesch and Schwirian, 2015; Liu and Mehta, 2020)
We research a particular instance of such negotiation, drawing lessons for health promotion and for COVID-19 communication
We study a Norwegian television debate in which an MD presented harsh criticism of the health authorities’ chosen crisis response in the early phase of the pandemic
Summary
The importance of trust for the ability of a government to handle health crises can hardly be exaggerated, as has been emphasized in multiple studies of past crises (Deurenberg-Yap et al, 2005; Mesch and Schwirian, 2015; Liu and Mehta, 2020). The centrality of trust in public institutions has been reconfirmed in the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, leading to calls for further studies of the interrelations of health promotion and trust (Van den Broucke, 2020). Connected to this issue is that of the credibility of the speaker (i.e. ethos), which becomes all-important when dealing with contingent matters where knowledge has to be established and opinions settled.
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