The Circulation of Science News in the Coronavirus Era

Whereas the coronavirus spreads irrespective of national, linguistic and media-specific constraints, the opposite can be said of news coverage about the virus, and science news more generally. Scientific knowledge undergoes various transformations in the course of travelling from the lab to the media to the news consumer. This project examines two such transformations – translation from one language to another, and remediation from one media platform to another – to better understand how science news circulates. This knowledge is all the more important in an era marked by an overabundance of news stories, some more accurate than others, on the coronavirus. This project provides 1) a big-picture analysis of translation and remediation practices in the Flemish science news ecosystem, and 2) an extensive case study zeroing in on news coverage about the search for a coronavirus vaccine. It is the first study to situate Flanders in the global media landscape in which science news circulates today.

Keywords:science news, news translation, science communication, coronavirus

Disciplines:Translation and interpretation sciences, Journalism studies, Science and health communication