Health Experts in the Media, Volume 2 E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Traditionally, health experts are called upon mainly by public authorities and academic circles. In recent years, however, thanks to the proliferation of media, 24-hour news channels and digital offerings, there is a growing demand for expert opinions on various health issues.

Expert knowledge can, of course, come from doctors and scientists, however it is not limited to them. Patient associations, caregiver circles, patient influencers, YouTubers and specialist journalists are speaking out, which raises questions concerning the place of the "expert" and the nature of their expertise.

Health Experts in the Media examines health experts’ place in the media in order to define the complexity of their role, question their legitimacy and better understand the controversies they generate.

This book analyzes how expert discourse in the media can raise major scientific, democratic and political issues.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Author Presentation

Preface

Part 1 Experts Involved in Public Health Controversies

1 The Pharmaceutical Treatment of Premature Ejaculation: “Gray-Zone Communication”

1.1. Introduction

1.2. The ambiguities and controversies regarding dapoxetine

1.3. A textbook case study of a gray-zone communication strategy

1.4. Conclusion

1.5. References

Notes

2 Battle of Expertise and Experts in the Media: The Case of Glyphosate (2000–2020)

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Battles of expertise in the media

2.3. Experts in media battles

2.4. Conclusion

2.5. References

Notes

3 The Influence of Opinion Leaders on Health Shows: L’Amour en Questions (1994–1998)

3.1. Introduction

3.2. The expert as both an “authority figure” and an “influencer”

3.3. The “controversial” expert

3.4. The “engaged” expert

3.5. Conclusion

3.6. References

Notes

4 The Case of the Belgian Medical Reform Group and the Media (1964–1990)

4.1. Introduction

4.2. GERM (1964–1990)

4.3. A group of experts… who communicate

4.4. GERM on the small screen

4.5. Conclusion

4.6. References

Notes

Part 2 Lay Expertise versus Scientific Expertise

5 Presenting the Expert’s Ethos in the Magazine Press: “Dr. H’s Column”

5.1. Introduction

5.2. When medical expertise is embodied: the case of Dr. H

5.3. Asymmetry in doctor–patient discourse

5.4. Vulnerable pregnant women

5.5. The midwife, or the temptation of the creator?

5.6. The father’s role

5.7. The limits of medical power

5.8. Conclusion

5.9. References

Notes

6 Caregivers in the Media: What is the Legitimacy in Their Expertise?

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Caregivers and their lay expertise in the media

6.3. The legitimacy of caregivers’ expertise

6.4. Conclusion

6.5. References

Notes

7 The Long Covid Patient: Legitimizing Patient Experience

7.1. Introduction

7.2. The emergence of legitimate expert knowledge

7.3. Methodology

7.4. Results

7.5. Discussion

7.6. Conclusion

7.7. References

Notes

8 Patient Influencers: Towards a Double Layer of Expertise

8.1. Introduction

8.2. Literature review and research questions

8.3. Methodology

8.4. Discussion of results

8.5. Conclusion

8.6. References

Notes

9 Legitimizing Lay Expertise: The Contribution of Terminology

9.1. Introduction

9.2. Contextualization

9.3. Methodology

9.4. Analysis and initial results

9.5. Conclusion

9.6. References

Notes

List of Authors

Index

Other titles from ISTE in Health Engineering and Society

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. Evolution of glyphosate and Roundup in the French National Diaries...

Figure 2.2. Front page of Nouvel Observateur, September 20, 2012. For a color ...

Figure 2.3. Glyphosate on Google Trends. For a color version of this figure, s...

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1. Topics covered in Dr. H’s column. For a color version of this figu...

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1. Recognition process of long Covid patient expertise (source: Roche...

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1. Results from spe_sc. For a color version of this figure, see www.i...

Figure 9.2. Results from pp_sc. For a color version of this figure, see www.is...

List of Tables

Chapter 2

Table 2.1. Actors and their stances

Table 2.2. Arguments used

Chapter 6

Table 6.1. Corpus from the study of three cases of caregivers covered in the m...

Table 6.2. List of content analysis criteria of cases studied

Table 6.3. Corpus of interviewees

Chapter 7

Table 7.1. The four strategies of legitimization (adapted from Zimmerman and Z...

Table 7.2. Dimensions of sociopolitical and cognitive legitimacy and their cha...

Chapter 8

Table 8.1. Types of expertise, origins, areas of expression and main modes of ...

Table 8.2. Summary of the study conducted by Husson and Sedda (2022)

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Author Presentation

Preface

Begin Reading

List of Authors

Index

Other titles from ISTE in Health Engineering and Society

End User License Agreement

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Communication and Health Set

coordinated byLaurence Corroy and Christelle Chauzal-Larguier

Volume 2

Health Experts in the Media

Between Legitimacy and Controversy

Edited by

Laurence Corroy

Christelle Chauzal-Larguier

Aurélie Pourrez

First published 2024 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUK

www.iste.co.uk

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USA

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2024The rights of Laurence Corroy, Christelle Chauzal-Larguier and Aurélie Pourrez to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939838

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 979-1-78630-976-1

Author Presentation

Christelle Chauzal-Larguier

Christelle Chauzal-Larguier is an Associate Professor of Management Sciences at the Clermont Auvergne University and a member of the Laboratoire communication et sociétés (EA 4647). Her research focuses on corporate communication and corporate social responsibility (CSR), including solidarity policy, which she explored from the perspective of paid family caregivers and the schemes devised to help them1.

Laurence Corroy

Laurence Corroy is a Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, UR 3476) at the University of Lorraine. Her work focuses on two main areas of research: first, critical media literacy, including digital technology and information literacy, and the communicative practices of young people; second, health education, particularly how health issues are formed in the public arena, television dramas and by related media discourse and representations.

Stéphanie Debray

Stéphanie Debray got her PhD at the University of Lorraine and is an associate member of the Archives Henri-Poincaré – Philosophie et Recherches sur les Sciences et les Technologies (AHP-PReST) research team. Her thesis investigates the demarcation problem between scientific and non-scientific productions, and the question of values in science in the field of the philosophy of science. Her research focuses on the distinctions between science and pseudoscience, scientific misconduct and other dark practices. She holds a temporary teaching and research position at Gustave Eiffel University as part of the university’s Information and Communication Sciences research team (2021–2023). Her dual disciplinary grounding enables her to study issues linked to the production, dissemination and impact of science in society, and to analyze its epistemic, methodological, communicational and organizational aspects, particularly where scientific activity involves different and competing actors (e.g. citizens, advocacy NGOs or industry representatives).

Valérie Delavigne

Valérie Delavigne is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a member of the laboratory CLESTHIA (EA 7345). She has worked for several years with the Institut National du Cancer, which offers an information platform and for which she directed the online dictionary for patients. Concerned by linguistics in touch with reality, her research focuses on the uses and social circulation of terminologies and on the forms of scientific, technical and medical popularization, in line with research into socioterminology. She is currently working on a critical dictionary on ecology, while continuing her research into the language aspects of medical expertise.

Lucile Desmoulins

Lucile Desmoulins is an Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Gustave Eiffel University and a member of the DICEN-Idf research team. Her research focuses on ICS and cognitive approaches to public policy, more precisely the links between organizational communication and influence, lobbying as well as scientific advocacy strategies. She questions for instance the hybridity of organizational and managerial forms and discourse. She also studies the methods and tools of influencer marketing, notably, through the discursive and organizational dimensions of identity and authority in the digital age and social media. As the head of the master’s program in business intelligence (BI), influence, lobbying and social media influence strategies (M2IE-ILMS), she analyzes the evolution of professional deontological standards and codes of ethics, focusing on dark BI and public relations digital methods and strategies.

Oihana Husson

Oihana Husson is a PhD candidate in Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Burgundy and a member of the CIMEOS (Communications, Mediations, Organizations, Knowledge, EA 4177) research unit. Her research focuses on healthcare expertise on social media and the professionalization of social media influencers.

Alexis Meyer

Alexis Meyer is the Manager of Bourbon-Lancy’s Tourist and Spa Information Office (Office de tourisme et du thermalisme) and an Associate Professor/Lecturer at the Clermont Auvergne University. After studying strategic information and international market policy, he first worked in the marketing department of a Lyon-based retail group, before taking over the management of Bourbon-Lancy’s Tourist and Spa Information Office. His research focuses mainly on institutional/corporate communications, with an emphasis on support in relation to strategies applied to the spa/wellness and tourism sectors.

Alexandra Micciche

Alexandra Micciche is a PhD student of Contemporary History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the University of Namur, and works with ULB’s Mondes modernes et contemporains (MMC) research center and the University of Namur’s Histoire, sons et images (HiSI) research group. As part of her doctoral project, she is studying the mobilizations of medical and nursing staff in their relationship with Belgian public television programs between 1964 and 1989.

Aurélie Picton

Aurélie Picton has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation Technology (TIM) at the University of Geneva since 2011. She teaches terminology, lexicology and language resources, language for special purposes and the use of corpora for translation. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics in 2009 from the University of Toulouse, co-funded by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Laboratoire CLLE-RSS, CNRS, UMR 5263) and the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES). She is also an associate member of the Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte (OLST) at the University of Montreal. Her main research interests concern the analysis of dialectal variation in specialized discourse, from a textual and socioterminological perspective. She is also interested in the impact of technologies on the practice/s of language professionals (e.g. the ANR CRISTAL project, 2012–2016). Since 2005, she has been involved in a number of applied projects on terminological variation and term circulation, particularly in the fields of space, humanitarian studies, particle physics and medicine.

Sylvie Pierre

Sylvie Pierre is a Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, UR 3476) at the University of Lorraine. Her main research interests concern the history, actor’s strategies and ethical issues of television. In the past, she was the editor head of the health and education department at La Cinquième Chaîne, Chaîne du savoir et de la connaissance from 1994 to 1998.

Aurélie Pourrez

Aurélie Pourrez is an Associate Professor in information and communication sciences at the University of Lorraine and a researcher at the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, UR 3476). Her work focuses on health communication and environmental communication. She also works on the social, environmental and ethical responsibility of organizations, as well as on communication implemented for the safety and health of employees. She directs the ANR GwadaSafeMeat project to reduce chlordecone contamination in the population via the informal beef circuit in Guadeloupe.

Émilie Roche

Émilie Roche is an Associate Professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University’s Centre de recherche sur les liens sociaux (CERLIS, UMR 8070). Her work examines the media coverage of violence (terrorism, war, urban and police violence), health, the environment and presidential campaigns.

Corinne Rochette

Corinne Rochette is a Professor at the Clermont Auvergne University’s School of Management (IAE) and a member of its CleRMa (Clermont recherche management) research center. She designed a master’s degree in Public Management, as well as one in the management of medico-social and healthcare organizations, and is co-founder and holder of the Health and Territories research chair of Clermont Auvergne University Foundation. She is Academic President of the International Association of Public Management Research and an expert for several public organizations, including the French Public Health Council. She studies the transformations of public organizations and services, as well as access to care, innovative organizational systems, governance and patient pathways. She is currently supervising six theses. Her research output amounts to some 100 academic contributions, including articles and conferences.

Baptiste Schummer

Baptiste Schummer is a PhD student in Political Science at the Centre d’études de recherches administratives politiques et sociales (CERAPS, UMR 8026) at the University of Lille. He is currently writing his thesis, under the supervision of Jean-Gabriel Contamin and Nicolas Kaciaf, comparing French media coverage of glyphosate and violence against women between 2000 and 2020. As an extension of his PhD project, he recently published an article, “Le glyphosate et les journalistes en France: la construction sociale d’un problème public médiatisé (2000–2020)”, in the journal Sur le journalisme, Volume 11, no. 2, 2022. He has also published in the journal Politiques de Communication, “Durer dans le champ médiatique. La carrière d’Alain Duhamel”, Volume 13, no. 2, 2019, which drew on his master’s thesis on the sociology of journalism (Sciences Po Lille).

Emma Thibert

Emma Thibert has worked as a Research and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Translation Technology (TIM) at the University of Geneva since June 2019, after having completed her master’s degree in Translation and Technology at the university’s Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. She collaborated on the Humanitarian Encyclopedia project, coordinated by the Geneva Centre for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action (CERAH), before joining the university’s terminology team, where she started working on her PhD thesis, under the supervision of Aurélie Picton (TIM-FTI) and Valérie Delavigne (CLESTHIA, Sorbonne Nouvelle University), in 2021. Her fields of interest are textual terminology, socioterminology, variation in specialty languages, corpus linguistics and term circulation.

Notes

1

Chauzal-Larguier, C. and Rouquette, S. (2018).

La solidarité, une affaire d’entreprise ?

Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand.

Preface

For a long time, expertise has primarily been used by policy makers. They have made use of expertise to provide a “rational” basis for policy decisions. To this end, public health policies are no exception. The relationship between health authorities, as the holders of knowledge-based expertise, and the State, as the centralized power, has long been imbued with it, maintaining its ambiguous nature (Tabuteau 2010). In recent decades, the practice of consulting experts has become more widespread, and “the challenge of expertise is all the more problematic given that the term has become more used and widespread and that times have transformed the learned and professional institutions that gave the expert their title in the 18th and (especially) 19th centuries” (Berrebi-Hoffmann and Lallement 2009, p. 6). It is no longer solely public authorities or academic circles that lay claim to the figure of the expert; now, experts are widely consulted by the media, for the purpose of informing the public and making expertise publically available, which has sparked debate over the content of “expert” knowledge, and the role and place of these experts (Collins and Evans 2007). The practice of consulting experts “whose research focus is conditioned by the imperatives of action and reform” (Delmas 2011, p. 16) is thus aimed at new objectives.

The term “expert”, deriving from the Latin expertus, means “one who has proven themselves”. According to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1687), in the 17th century, an expert was defined as “well-versed in/adept at some art that can be learned by experience”, such as surgery. At the same time, Richelet’s dictionary defined an expert as a “savant, adept and accomplished in something; experienced”. This two-pronged meaning was more explicitly divided in the 19th century, as evident in Littré (1863): on the one hand, the expert refers to an individual “who has, through experience, acquired great skill in a profession” and, on the other, one “who, having acquired knowledge of certain things, is appointed to verify and decide on them”. In the field of health, a distinction is made between expert appraisals, such as psychiatric appraisals, carried out by doctors, and psychological appraisals carried out by health professionals or medical specialists who are not doctors in a variety of circumstances (e.g. personal follow-up of the patient, legal cases, administrative litigation, etc.).

The expert and their expertise are the subject of increasing attention in academic research, giving rise to an abundance of publications. Researchers from various disciplinary fields have sought to gain a better understanding of expertise and have drawn on different approaches to develop methods of analysis, such as psychology and its individual approach, sociology opting for a more contextualized approach, or management sciences and their organizational angle. In information and communication sciences, researchers seek to understand the communicational, political and heuristic dynamics of the practice of consulting of experts, particularly by the media. Today, society’s many developments in the field of health and communication are renewing interest in experts and the questions they arouse. This book sets out to examine in detail the widespread use of experts, who are positioned as informants, authority figures or interpreters of current events (Campion and Van Wynsberge 2017), by journalists, their presence in traditional and digital media and the pliable definition of expertise, among other issues.

The media coverage of health experts’ words highlights the difficulty recipients have in assessing legitimacy and the trust that can be placed in them. There is an element of vagueness and ambivalence in the notion of expertise as it is conceptualized by the media that needs to be investigated further. This can be seen in examples of experts’ (sometimes conflicting) opinions on recurring topics in public health – health crises, vaccinations, end of life care, chronic care pathways – as well as well-being-related matters and factors (sexuality, nutrition, environment, etc.) for a healthy life. The proliferation of the media, news channels and digital offerings, while at the same time the increase in life expectancy – which has doubled in the space of a century – poses new medical challenges, has led to a growing demand for expert advice, which in recent years has become increasingly complex and protean.

The very identity of the expert called upon to deal with medical issues is not self-evident, since real-life experience, scholarly knowledge or media coverage seem to justify their presence, depending on the case. Who qualifies as a health expert?

The complex figure of the health expert

The figure of the health expert, as consulted by the media, is neither subject to the same standards of transparency, nor required to meet the same criteria of competence as when they are consulted by policy makers (Joly 1999; Bérard and Crespin 2010). As such, the aim of this book is to study the health expert in the media in order to understand the complexity of their role, question their legitimacy and to better understand the controversies they can provoke. Generally speaking, legitimacy can be defined as a “generalized perception or supposition that an entity’s actions are desirable, and appropriate within a socially-constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and meanings” (Suchman 1995, p. 574).

A person with a particular kind of institutionally recognized (and therefore legitimate) expertise may be presented as an expert in a completely different context. Today, the expert has many facets, adaptable or even shaped to suit the context, and can in turn take on “the features of the consultant proposing reforms”, don “the clothes of the evaluator and auditor”, propose indicators and assume “the role of the scientist” analyzing the risks incurred by the population (Berrebi-Hoffmann and Lallement 2009, p. 6). This can fuel mistrust or suspicion of manipulation of opinions1, but it can also influence and, in some cases, overturn the relationship between the media and “experts”. While the intent here is not necessarily to sway public opinion, the tendency to call on experts for matters that fall outside of their recognized field of expertise has led to the spread of a buzzword that has become fashionable since the Covid-19 pandemic: ultracrepidarianism, which involves giving our opinion on subjects despite lacking the competence to do so (Villain 2021). In academia, where research fields are becoming increasingly specific, this sudden interdisciplinarity vis-à-vis expertise may seem strange:

Today, expertise is at the heart of public debate; it is at the heart of controversies that touch on broad social challenges connected to scientific, technical, and ethical issues. (Dumoulin 2013, p. 717)

Influencers who endorse products in the name of health expertise, despite being paid to do so by brands, are yet another example of this phenomenon.

It is worth considering how journalists go about consulting experts and the strategies they use. Major public health issues and successive health contexts have seen the multiplication of various, contradictory expert voices, summoned in contracted times (health crises linked to food, meteorological phenomena, an epidemic or a pandemic, exposure to a contaminating element, etc.), which may constitute an additional difficulty for journalists, particularly in terms of ethics. Indeed, these choices have the potential to influence the way in which a major public health problem can become a public health problem. Yet, it remains unclear whether these strategies are profoundly different from those generally used by the press, and what verification tools journalists mobilize on this occasion (Bigot 2017). The processing of scientific news, its hierarchization, the ways in which journalists mobilize enunciative procedures to get researchers and doctors to talk, as well as the way in which the words of experts are requested, presented and used, are all pressing issues.

Journalists specialized in the field of healthcare journalism have been able to claim, or they have been granted, the qualification of health expert, and in this capacity they have worked as consultants on TV or in other media, which have not explained the career trajectory and prior training of these journalists (Comby 2009). In such cases, would the term “consultant” not be more accurate than “expert” to describe journalists of this profile? On the other hand, a small number of doctors and researchers are regularly invited to take on the role of columnists or even TV directors. For Gérald Kierzek, an emergency doctor who is used to appearing on television:

[D]octors on television have the necessary legitimacy, acquired beyond their title, through their practice. This proximity to care and patients seems to be an important condition for a discourse that makes sense and is connected to the field. It is also a rare but interesting career move for practitioners locked into rigid and unattractive curricula, whether in hospital or the private sector, or quite simply a breath of fresh air for more occasional appearances that allow them to showcase their work or research. (Kierzek 2023)

The boundary between health journalists and medical journalists is becoming porous, and the presentation of each other’s legitimacy as health experts is not universally accepted and recognized.

While the media offers an ever-expanding space for expression, including everyone’s personal opinion on a health topic, which can be easily and widely shared online, this does not make everyone an expert and their opinions real expertise (Prior 2003) – a term that is now widely “overused” (Bernard 2022). Nevertheless, new forms of expertise are emerging, particularly on the Internet.

Forms of expertise in healthcare

According to Grimaldi (2010, p. 92), “[t]he scientific expert is not only a scientist, but also an experienced person who has mastered the multiple facets of their field of expertise, is aware of their limits, and is able to call on complementary expertise”. Alongside doctors and professional carers, a wide variety of non-professional stakeholders involved in healthcare processes are now taking the floor. Whether they are peer caregivers, expert caregivers, expert patients, expert users, etc., their place is growing within healthcare establishments, where they are recognized as a form of expertise. The “expert patient” (Shaw and Baker 2004; Lindsay and Vrijhoef 2009) and, more recently, other lay experts, such as non-professional caregivers, are the focus of increasing attention in scientific research, although the bounds of their expertise remain largely unexplored.

Other types of actors – such as influencers, associations, groups of patients or relatives, road accident victims, victims of industrial accidents, etc. – also hold a form of healthcare expertise, and can act as whistleblowers by helping to mobilize public opinion and generate media coverage of a health cause, which can in turn lead the State to better consider, or even recognize, urgent social issues (e.g. occupational illness, drug poisoning, prevention, etc.).

However, the media coverage of complementary expertise remains confidential, and the role played by doctors is no stranger to this, as “the change from a paternalistic to a deliberative model modifies the status of the doctor and leads to resistance on their part, consciously or unconsciously, to these changes and to the changes they imply (notably in their own behaviors) in order to preserve the asymmetry of knowledge, the basis of their power” (Boudier et al. 2012). In other words, doctors, or more generally professional caregivers, are reluctant to share their healthcare expertise in the media. Could this stem from a fear of seeing their power and authority, and therefore their legitimacy, compromised in a Weberian sense?

As someone with scientific knowledge, a doctor is recognized as legitimate and legitimized in making decisions concerning the best course of treatment for a given patient2. However, their expert judgment cannot be considered absolute. Although some doctors have become accustomed to the exercise of communication in the media (such as Professor Salomon and Professor Raoult), this expertise is shaken up, even contested and, in certain ultimate cases, challenged, as recent examples relating to vaccination or the treatment of certain cancers can attest, reinforcing the conception of Habermasian legitimacy according to which the latter arises as the result “of general deliberation” (Habermas 1973, p. 180). The risk taken by legitimate experts in the media is all the greater as their field of expertise is expanded and fragmented on the Internet, and any form of discourse can be commented on and directly challenged.

Traditional and digital media also serve as a sounding board for patients and their families, who have developed a form of expertise through their own experiences of health conditions. This expertise, of a different nature, is described as “lay” and often recognized as complementary to “academic” expertise (Massé 2012). Research has highlighted the necessary coexistence of the two (McClean and Shaw 2005), but this supposes that the context of coexistence leaves a clear field of expression to each. An acceptable definition would include people with no academic training in the area of health about which they are expressing themselves (Salman and Topçu 2015). For Barbaras (1998), knowledge gained through experience cannot be generalized given the contextual specificities in which it was acquired, thus echoing Popper’s (1991) distinction between knowledge specific to each individual and acquired through personal experience, and scientific knowledge that is recognized by the community, shared by a collective and transmissible as is, extending beyond the individual.

The “lay” expert holds what is generally referred to as experiential knowledge of their own situation (Simon et al. 2020), just like the “experienced consumer” (Leveratto 2021) or the “ordinary public” who develops a particular appetence (Rouquette 2021). The concept of experiential knowledge, coined by Borkman (1976), is not without confusion (Hejoaka et al. 2019). The lay expert may serve as a possible resource for the patient who lacks medical and therapeutic knowledge of their own health condition (Bolam et al. 2003). Here, let us make a clear distinction between experience and expertise: while “the patient is increasingly recognized and used as an expert who has acquired their expertise through experience” (Jouet 2009, p. 47), to be an expert, “they must be able to communicate, to explain clearly without distorting information, and to be pedagogical” (Friconneau et al. 2020, p. 62). This makes all the difference.

But as soon as a group of “laypeople” are accompanied by a medical professional or involved in a scientific committee, the expert opinion becomes “half-lay, half-professional”, producing “a counter-expertise” (Grimaldi 2010, p. 91). Some patients’ associations, thanks to the quality of their field studies and research, have been able to assert their expertise in the healthcare field (Dalgalarrondo 2007). When a “lay” expert shares their knowledge, questions remain as to how to communicate, the media chosen to do so and the targets of their discourse. At another level, it is the legitimacy of speaking out in the public arena, and the power this gives them to exercise, deserve to be explained. At a time when everyone can share their experiences and advice on the Internet, digital social networks play an important role, enabling forms of resistance to the dominant medical discourse to flourish (Aka Miézan 2022).

This book intends to share work relating to the processes of media legitimation or delegitimization of expert figures, to the evolution of the mediatization processes of scientific knowledge, or even to the political game, tacit or not, institutional experts requested. Does the media presence of health experts influence institutional discourse, decision-making and the implementation of health policy in France (Akrich and Rabeharisoa 2012)? How do the different actors express themselves on health issues (Chopyak and Levesque 2002)? And with what regime of truth and controversy? This work, with contributions from researchers from across the humanities and social sciences, offers elements of answers by presenting in a first part works that analyze media controversies of experts, then in a second the conflict of expertise lay people and scientists in the media.

Notes

Preface written by Laurence CORROY and Christelle CHAUZAL-LARGUIER.

1

We can point to the manipulation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee as the root of this mistrust. Dr. Clarence Cook Little was put in charge of the research group that was supposed to be studying the causality of tobacco in lung cancer, but he was actually receiving funding to study the genetic factor in the onset of cancer from 1959 to 1964.

2

French Council of State order of July 26, 2017.