Politicization or clarification? An analysis of the structure of actors and statements in media discourses on health risk phenomena and the role of scientific experts

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic was and is an extremely present and much-discussed issue in public. According to Habermas, a normative requirement for public discourse is that, in principle, all social groups can participate in it. This is especially true when political decisions have to be made regarding socially relevant questions and problems. We ask which groups of actors were involved in the public corona discourse in which proportions and what kind of statements they made in the articles. We answer these questions in comparison to six other public health debates by using quantitative content analyses of the media coverage. A special focus of our analysis is on scientific actors who, according to Weber's principle of freedom from value judgments in science, should ideally be involved in the discourse in the role of factual ‘enlighteners' but should not make political recommendations for action. Our analysis reveals some specifics of the corona discourse compared to the other health debates. In 2020, especially actors from the political executive and representatives of partial interests were strongly present within the public corona debate. Representatives of public goods interests, on the other hand, played almost no role at all, and scientific actors at least did not play a dominant role. The occurrence of scientific actors within the corona articles is relatively strongly coupled with actors from politics. This suggests that the political executive relied heavily on scientific expertise during the corona crisis. Substantiating statements clearly dominate the statement structure in COVID-19 reporting. Scientific experts expressed policy recommendations moderately more frequently in the corona debate than in the comparison debates. © Melanie Leidecker-Sandmann, Markus Lehmkuhl.