“The chilling effect”: Medical scientists’ responses to audience feedback on their media appearances during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many medical scientists became public personas as a result of their media appearances. However, this prominence also made them likely targets of harassment from an increasingly science-skeptic public. Such experiences may lead to scientists cutting back on their public engagement activities, threatening the quality of science communication. This study examines how medical scientists evaluate feedback they received as a result of their media appearances, and how they relate their experiences to general views of the public, as well as their motivations to serve as media experts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 Austrian medical scientists who served as media experts during the first year of the pandemic, we find substantial amounts of online abuse. Yet, this did not cause our respondents to avoid future media appearances, because their motivations to meet the needs of an unsettled public outweighed the experience of being harassed online.

The Age of the Expert—COVID-19, Expertise, and Conflicts of Interest in Austrian Media Reporting

“…In our corpus, we did not detect any distancing devices or indicators of uncertainty-with the exception of prognoses. This is clearly problematic as it "contradicts the logic of science, which is actually characterized by uncertainty and tentativeness" (Nguyen and Catalan-Matamoros 2020; cited by Nölleke et al 2023). Whatever the experts postulated, it was imbued by journalists with authority and credibility by virtue of the expert label.…”

“…While there has been considerable research performed on the use of sources by journalists (Herman and Chomsky 2002;Albaek et al 2014;MacLeod 2019), the role of experts in the media (Albaek et al 2003;Albaek 2011;Wien 2001Wien , 2014, the gender distribution of experts and sources (Prommer and Stüwe 2020; Shine 2021), as well as experts' reactions to audience feedback (Nölleke et al 2023), there is a paucity of research on potential conflicts of interest or the relationship of experts' professional experience with their specific claims (see also Boyce 2007), in particular for the Austrian context. The little research that does exist on this topic in the context of COVID-19 suggests that experts mentioned in the media tend to have financial conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies (Murayama et al 2021) and that this influences their public statements (Roussel and Raoult 2020).…”

Using Behavioral Science for Infodemic Preparedness: The Case of Vaccination Misinformation

“…This is because bad press for a single individual could threaten the public's trust in vaccination (Holford, Fasce, Tapper et al, 2023). In addition, the individual may experience high levels of emotional stress during the course of the pandemic (Nölleke et al, 2023) and is likely to become the target of aggressive vaccine deniers and even death threats-an experience shared by many researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Nogrady, 2021).…”

Editorial: Science Communication in the Digital Age—New Actors, Environments, and Practices

“…Digital media has given rise to a pluralization of voices in science communication, along with individualization and, in some cases, fragmentation or even polarization of audiences (Schäfer & Metag, 2021). Other characteristics of digital information environments are also posing challenges for communication about science: misinformation and disinformation distributed on various platforms (Scheufele & Krause, 2019), hardening counter-publics online (Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017), online attacks on scientists, and a lack of institutional support for scientific communicators (Gosse et al, 2021;Nölleke et al, 2023). Many of these trends were accentuated, amplified, and accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic.…”