Abstract

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.

Highlights

  • The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has been recognized as one of the most dramatic global health crises of the last decades

  • The analysis described below consists of three nested corpora of newspaper articles: i) a corpus containing all the articles published in the timespan between January 1, 2020 and June 15, 2020; ii) the corpus of articles selected within the “total corpus” according to the occurrence of keywords related to SARS-CoV-2 and; iii) the “SARS-CoV-2 focused corpus” derived from the previous one through the selection of articles related to the “politics”, “science”, and “medicine” thematic domains emerging from the topic modelling

  • The experts were gathered into a “Technical–Scientific Committee” (TSC), an ad hoc taskforce charged with offering advice and evidence-based guidelines for managing the SARS-CoV-2 crisis

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Summary

Introduction

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has been recognized as one of the most dramatic global health crises of the last decades. Science and politics relationships in the context of Covid-19 pandemic (newspaper), and URL of each of the 58,646 articles belonging to the “SARS-CoV-2 general corpus.”.

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