When scientific experts come to be media stars: An evolutionary model tested by analysing coronavirus media coverage across Italian newspapers

by Federico Neresini, Paolo Giardullo, Emanuele Di Buccio, Barbara Morsello, Alberto Cammozzo, Andrea Sciandra, Marco Boscolo

The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain remarkable media visibility. It has been analysed a corpus of 213,875 articles published by the eight most important Italian newspapers across the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. By exploring this process along the different phases of the management of the emergency in Italy, it was observed that some scientific experts achieve high media visibility—and sometimes notwithstanding their low academic reputation–thus becoming a sort of “media star”. Scientific literature about the relationship between experts and media is considerable, nonetheless we found a lack of theoretical models able to analyse under which conditions experts are able to enter and to remain prominent in the media sphere. A Media Experts Evolutionary Model (MEEM) is proposed in order to analyze the main conditions under which experts can acquire visibility and how they can “survive” in media arena. We proceeded by analysing visibility of experts during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and considering both their individual credentials previously acquired and the media environment processes of selection; MEEM acts hence as a combination of these two levels. Regarding the credentials, we accounted for i) institutional role/position, ii) previous media visibility, and iii) matches between scientific credentials and media competence. In our analysis, we collected evidence that high visibility in newspapers can be seen as evolutionary in the sense that some profiles—i.e. a particular configuration of credentials—are more adapt to specific media environments.