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This book is aimed at researchers, students, and practitioners interested in how the voices of experts have been conveyed in the public sphere during the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond controversies over the selection of these experts by governments or the media, the book draws on methodologies from discourse analysis, media studies, political science, sociology, and social psychology to compare the role that experts played in justifying unpopular political decisions. Several configurations have emerged, including politically contested systems with medical heroes, bureaucratized systems with a super-reference expert, or more collegiate forms of committees tasked with providing political leaders with the necessary reports to justify political decisions.
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