Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Department of Information Engineering (DEI), University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
PLoS One. 2023 Apr 26;18(4):e0284841. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284841. eCollection 2023.
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.
本文旨在探讨科学专家如何获得并保持显著的媒体能见度。研究分析了 2020 年和 2021 年意大利八家最重要的报纸在新冠疫情期间发表的 213875 篇文章的语料库。通过在意大利疫情管理的不同阶段探索这一过程，研究人员发现，一些科学专家获得了很高的媒体能见度，尽管他们的学术声誉不高，但却成为了一种“媒体明星”。关于专家与媒体之间关系的科学文献相当多，但我们发现缺乏能够分析专家在何种条件下能够进入并在媒体领域保持突出地位的理论模型。因此，提出了一种“媒体专家进化模型”（MEEM），以分析专家获得能见度的主要条件，以及他们如何在媒体领域“生存”。我们通过分析 SARS-CoV-2 大流行期间专家的能见度，并考虑他们之前获得的个人资历和媒体环境的选择过程，来进行分析；MEEM 因此是这两个层面的结合。关于资历，我们考虑了 i）机构角色/职位，ii）之前的媒体能见度，以及 iii）科学资历和媒体能力之间的匹配。在我们的分析中，我们收集了证据表明，报纸上的高能见度可以被视为进化的，因为某些形象——即特定的资历配置——更适应特定的媒体环境。
