When scientific experts come to be media stars: An evolutionary model tested by analysing coronavirus media coverage across Italian newspapers.

The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain remarkable media visibility. It has been analysed a corpus of 213,875 articles published by the eight most important Italian newspapers across the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. By exploring this process along the different phases of the management of the emergency in Italy, it was observed that some scientific experts achieve high media visibility-and sometimes notwithstanding their low academic reputation-thus becoming a sort of "media star". Scientific literature about the relationship between experts and media is considerable, nonetheless we found a lack of theoretical models able to analyse under which conditions experts are able to enter and to remain prominent in the media sphere. A Media Experts Evolutionary Model (MEEM) is proposed in order to analyze the main conditions under which experts can acquire visibility and how they can "survive" in media arena. We proceeded by analysing visibility of experts during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and considering both their individual credentials previously acquired and the media environment processes of selection; MEEM acts hence as a combination of these two levels. Regarding the credentials, we accounted for i) institutional role/position, ii) previous media visibility, and iii) matches between scientific credentials and media competence. In our analysis, we collected evidence that high visibility in newspapers can be seen as evolutionary in the sense that some profiles-i.e. a particular configuration of credentials-are more adapt to specific media environments.

Free choice in the making: Vaccine-related activism as an alternative form of citizenship during the Covid-19 pandemic

The paper analyzes how free vax communities reframe health emergency during Covid-19 pandemic. We examined, through a digital ethnography on the main Italian free-vax online communities - Comilva, Corvelva and Movimento 3V – the public contestation of anti-Covid health policies by comparing their different styles of vaccine-related activism. Contesting health policy during pandemic was not just a matter of misinformation or related to the spreading of fake news, but actions and claims of free vax communities were based on specific processes of knowledge-making and biopolitics. The Science and Technology Studies (STS) framework, adopted throughout the analysis, provides the opportunity to review the vaccination controversies debate, by focusing on free vax public activities, aimed at counteracting mainstream knowledge and health policies adopted by the government to face the Covid-19 emergency. The analysis offers an entry point for understanding the nexus among the claims of free vax communities and the emerging idea of citizenship related to health, individual rights, and public participation in contemporary society.

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

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.