![]() However, this trust is tempered by pockets of unease with scientific activity. In the UK, annual surveys show the proportion of the population who trust scientists is increasing, rising from 63% in 1997 to 84% in 2019. For example, a 2019 survey of 22 countries identified scientists as the world’s most trusted profession. On the one hand, overt support of the scientific community is high. The ambivalent quality of the public’s relationship with science is borne out by empirical research suggesting lay attitudes to science are complex and contradictory. This cultural moment was exemplified in the selection of “post-truth” as the 2016 Oxford Dictionaries word of the year, connoting a rise of “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Public support for populist causes (e.g., Brexit in the UK) or leaders (e.g., Donald Trump in the US or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil) has been interpreted as reflecting antipathy towards experts, who are equated with elitism and intellectual arrogance. Disenchantment from science has recently become a growing focus of political discourse worldwide. This public alienation from science is further elaborated by sociologists Beck and Giddens, who observe that while technological innovation is a crucial motor of social progress, it has also produced many human hazards, such as environmental pollution, nuclear disasters, and antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases. However, Habermas contends that the resultant proclivity for tackling social problems through technocratic solutions undermined opportunities for democratic public participation in decision-making, feeding an ‘institutional alienation’ in which sectors of the public feel socially detached from scientific elites. The demise of religious influence in post-industrial Western societies allowed science to forge a monopoly on the production of credible knowledge. Several social theorists have characterised public responses to science as profoundly ambivalent. By inductively exploring the meanings attached to the term ‘science’ in popular media, the analysis aims to reveal how public discourse defined, interpreted and evaluated science during the pandemic. ![]() The current paper reports a qualitative analysis of how science was represented in news and social media during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island of Ireland. The ways the pandemic has affected science–society relations, which in western societies were already under challenge from a purported cultural turn against expertise, remain to be seen. Yet the pandemic has also publicly exposed instances of flawed or fraudulent research, dissension within the scientific community, misdirected policy advice, and appropriation of scientific claims to serve politicised interests. With individual and societal recovery resting on scientific advances in understanding, preventing and treating COVID-19, the pandemic has underscored the existential importance of scientific activity. Unlike the many cultural and economic institutions that public health restrictions have immobilised, some scientific fields have seen an unprecedented boost in their public profile and funding. Understanding the COVID-19 pandemic’s cultural legacy requires interrogation of the specific impacts that the virus and its countermeasures have had in all societal domains. However, the study also identified risks the pandemic might pose to science communication, including feeding public alienation by disparaging lay understandings, reinforcing stereotypical images of scientists, and amplifying the politicisation of scientific statements. The analysis suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic represented a platform to highlight the value, philosophy, process and day-to-day activity of scientific research. Three themes characterised the range of meanings attached to science: ‘Defining science: Its subjects, practice and process’, ‘Relating to science: Between veneration and suspicion’ and ‘Using science: As solution, policy and rhetoric’. ![]() Thematic analysis was performed on a dataset comprising 952 news articles and 603 tweets published between 1 January and. This study advances understanding of science–society relations during the COVID-19 pandemic by analysing how science was represented in news and social media coverage of COVID-19 on the island of Ireland. COVID-19 is arguably the most critical science communication challenge of a generation, yet comes in the wake of a purported populist turn against scientific expertise in western societies.
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