The coronavirus pandemic created a situation in which virological and epidemiological science became highly politically relevant but was uncertain and fragmented. This raises the question as to how science could inform policymaking and public debate on societal crisis management. Based on an online survey of Germans ( N = 1513) representative for age, gender, education, and place of residence, we investigate citizens’ prescriptive views of the relationships between science, policymaking, and the media. Views differ depending on their informational needs and epistemic beliefs. People with a need for definite information and a view of scientific knowledge as static wanted scientists to dominate policymaking and journalists to deliver definite information about the coronavirus. People with an informational need to construct their own opinions wanted journalists to question policy and scientific advice. Furthermore, they rejected the idea of scientists dominating policymaking. Results are discussed with reference to theories of science and democracy.

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Contributing to the study of curated news flows, we investigated how conflicting participants in an issue public fed mainstream news into their Twitter networks. In a quasi-experimental field study in the context of the 2018 European Court of Justice’s ruling on genome editing, we combined standardized manual content analyses of a universe of legacy media news items ( N = 165), users’ tweets (“feeds”) linking these news items ( N = 2014), and users’ profiles ( N = 1070). Confirming existing knowledge, opponents and proponents of genetically modified organisms largely fed news items confirming their issue attitudes. Extending existing knowledge, we show that counter-attitudinal news feeding became more likely when users had a political disadvantage rather than a political advantage in the controversy. However, this was only true for the more active but not for the more inactive news feeders.