Expert knowledge, communication and government in pandemics

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the discourses produced in two digital newspapers about the link between expert knowledge and the State during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic in Argentina. It explores the treatment that the media constructed about the configuration of technical-political elites, the discourses that are legitimized by them and the disputes and tensions present in this process. It focuses on contents, sources, actors and assessment. The data are elaborated on the basis of discourse analysis, taking into account the complex relationships between the text (structures of journalistic discourse) and its context of production (socio-historical conditions). The results obtained point out the importance of the presence of the role of expert knowledge in the media, as an element that guides the discussion and provides legitimacy to the communication of the measures taken during the pandemic, the focus of the discussion around the measures and the tensions that emerge in it with respect to the expert knowledge protagonists and the reproduction of the biomedical model. Finally, the need for comprehensive responses in strategies that take into account the psychosocial-economic dimension and the social particularities of the scenarios to which they are oriented is discussed.