Wissenschaftskommunikation im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft, Politik und Medien: zur Aushandlung von Gesprächsnormen in Pressekonferenzen und Polit-Talkshows

Abstract

Since the beginning of the corona pandemic at the beginning of 2020, virologists have
been present in the mass media and are often guests on (political) talk shows. Here, different
discourse logics and norms meet, namely those of science, politics, and the media. In this area of
conflict, discourse-pragmatic adjustments on the part of scientists occur. In this article, we investigate
1) how scientists establish themselves as epistemic authorities in the different formats and
2) how they try to enforce scientific discourse routines in media-mediated and politically framed
discourses. As a basis of this empirical research, we compiled a corpus of press conferences organized
by the Science Media Center Germany in Cologne and political talk shows of the public
broadcasters in the period from March 2020 to April 2021. It turns out that the scientists behave
in accordance with their scientific discourse norms and are hardly prepared to cross borders. The
article aims to show in detail which strategies scientists use to hold on to their scientific discourse
routines.