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 and the application of Bourdieu’s field theory to this subject provide sociologists of science with new tools to make sense of journalists’ work in controversies. This paper draws on this literature to shed light 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 the diversity in the media coverage of this issue. I show that journalists presented a variety of conceptions of their role during this crisis. This was reflected in significant variations in how the issue was covered in the French news media. These variations are linked to journalists’ professional trajectories, their media’s position in the market and the overall evolution of the field of health journalism. These results contrast with the traditional account of why vaccine criticism emerges in the news that presents journalists on the whole as being favourable towards the “antivaccine movement” and as interested in fostering controversies on vaccination.
Race for pandemic flu vaccine rife with hurdles