Journalists and Science: Boundary-making in the media coverage of the 2009 pandemic flu vaccine’s safety in France
Résumé
The theoretical debate about the role played by the media in controversies over science and technology has mostly died out since the beginning of the 2000s. The emergence of a neo-institutionalist sociology of journalism, in particular the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to this subject, provides sociologists of science with new tools to make sense of journalists’ work in controversies. This paper draws on this literature to shed light on the media coverage of the controversy over the safety of the 2009 pandemic flu vaccine. Using semi-structured interviews with journalists who covered this issue for the French agenda-setting news-media and content analysis of the coverage proposed by a sample of these media, it analyses how journalists circumscribed debates regarding this subject in relation with their sources. It shows that almost all journalists endorsed the dominant view that the “antivaccine movement” lacks any scientific credibility even if they disagreed on whether this judgment applies to all forms of vaccine criticism. It presents the various ways in which these judgments were translated into concrete boundary work in their coverage: By selecting among vaccine critics those to give voice to, in their presentation of these sources and in their framing choices for this issue. By analysing this boundary-making work, this paper contributes both to sociology of science and to sociology of journalism.