The media have become an important arena where struggles over the symbolic legitimacy of expert authority take place and where scientific experts increasingly have to compete for public recognition. The rise of authoritarian and populist leaders in many countries and the growing importance of social media have fueled criticism against scientific institutions and individual researchers. This paper discusses the new hidden forms of suppression and self-censorship regarding scientists’ roles as public experts. It is based on two web surveys conducted among Finnish researchers in 2015 and 2017. We focus on answers to the open-ended questions in these surveys, where respondents reflect upon issues of freedom of expression and the feedback they receive in public arenas. Building on previous research on suppression, “research silencing,” and the “chilling effect,” we discuss the connection between freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry. We make a distinction between four forms of suppression: political and economic control, organizational control, control between rival academics, and control from publics. Moreover, we make explicit and discuss the means, motives, and practices of suppression within each of these four forms.

What constitutes healthy eating is experiencing ongoing public debate, and this debate is increasingly taking place on the Internet. In this article, using a dialectical approach to analyse rhetorical discourse, we investigated how six highly popular Finnish nutrition counselling bloggers construct dietetic credibility and understanding. Their argumentation is compared to that of two academic experts contributing to the blog of the National Institute for Health and Welfare. Theoretically, we draw on Michael Billig's notions on how thinking and understanding are pervasively argumentative and reflect wider socio-cultural contexts, and on the dilemmatic nature of common sense. We demonstrate how the popular Finnish nutrition counselling bloggers rhetorically constructed a more particularistic and individualistic understanding of healthy eating in their argumentation in critical opposition to the universalistic and population-based understanding. In the popular Finnish nutrition counselling bloggers argumentation, practical, subjective and moral knowledge was valued, alongside abstract, scientific knowledge. In contrast, the National Institute for Health and Welfare bloggers typically utilised population-based averages and causalities in their argumentation. We argue that arguing over healthy eating in the public domain is fundamentally an epistemic struggle, in which different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing are valued, and dilemmas related to healthy eating are deliberated.

Previous research on journalism and expertise has tended to point out the shortcomings and biases in how journalists consider expertise and use expert sources. Such analyses, however, rely on a substantialist preconception of expertise and treat the issue of expertise and journalism as a normative issue. Based on 10 in-depth interviews with journalists drawn from a broader interview study, this study draws on the notion of interpretative repertoire as an analytical tool and investigates how journalists account for journalistic judgement of expertise in the context of healthy eating. The article identifies four different repertoires, in which each journalistic judgement of dietetic expertise is interpreted and constructed in different terms. It argues that this interpretative variability in journalists’ accounts might be less telling of an incomplete understanding of expertise than of the complexity and tensions involved in how expertise in the context of health is judged in journalism.