Morten Mørland’s cartoon, titled  “Michael Gove Experts!”, appeared in The Times on 20 April 2020. Reposted with permission. 

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that expertise matters for democracy because modern democratic decision-making depends on specialised knowledge. We rely on experts to understand risks, trade-offs, and likely consequences in areas ranging from public health to taxation.

At the same time, the pandemic effectively reminded us that science is inherently incomplete and open to revision in light of new evidence. 

Political decisions rarely rest on fully settled science, and uncertainty breeds disagreement. As a result, decisions that affect people’s lives often involve value judgements about evidence thresholds, acceptable risk, uncertainty, and social priorities. Many are judgements that no expert community can legitimately resolve in isolation from the public.

This is where journalism comes in – and where the problems this project seeks to unpack begin. Journalism’s difficulties with expertise are connected to democratic tensions created by the power experts are granted in modern societies. The report draws on political theory in an attempt to shed light on what this could imply for understanding journalism’s role – especially in a digital era where the public recognition of expertise is shifting. As one philosopher put it: expert authority is now “at the same time frighteningly powerful and fatally weakened”.

Journalists have a responsibility not to mislead and to protect audiences from disinformation and deception. This means elevating the best available knowledge – and it means holding the (presumed) experts to account. The scholar Michael Schudson reminds us that journalists should also see it as a scandal whenever political actors try to silence or distort the message of independent experts.

And it must all be done while fulfilling another core journalistic mission: sustaining a societal conversation that includes diverse perspectives and disciplines and that gives the public a meaningful voice. This creates a tension that needs to be better understood.

But expertise also poses a tangible practical challenge to journalists: a central claim of some of the experts consulted for this project is that journalism’s difficulties stem from their epistemic position. Journalists are structurally epistemically inferior to the experts they cover: they usually cannot assess technical claims directly but must instead make second-order judgements about credibility, relevance, and authority. In practice, this often means relying – more or less self-consciously – on rules of thumb (heuristics) for who to trust. Journalists draw on cues such as credentials, adherence to scientific consensus, conflicts of interest, and performance in debate deciding which expert claims deserve attention and how they should be framed. (See Glossary tab.) Applying such criteria is however difficult. As the philosopher Alfred Moore emphasised in an interview: “The dismal answer is there are no shortcuts.” 

Journalists are faced with a paradox, Moore contended: on the one hand, it would be “epistemic overstepping” if journalists try to pick winners in expert debates. But at the same time, we can’t allow ourselves to be manipulated or to risk passing on harmful misinformation unwittingly. “You then can’t get away from the need to exercise some substantive judgement about the quality of the sources,” Moore said. 

While insufficient, the different criteria for trust may nevertheless provide a language for pitfalls and opportunities journalists encounter when navigating specialised knowledge. Discussing their strengths and limitations can sharpen journalists’ critical thinking and awareness of their own limits when facing technical analysis and disagreement between scientists.

To further clarify this “meta-expertise”, the project draws on the Periodic Table of Expertise, developed by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. It provides a map of different kinds of expertise that is also relevant to journalism. The framework helps explain why some voices are appropriately authoritative in certain contexts but not others, and why confusion about expertise often arises when boundaries are crossed or left implicit. (See Glossary tab.) 

This framework also highlights the importance investing time in conversations with scientists and other experts.  A lot of what matters, such as who is taken seriously within a field, exists as tacit social knowledge within expert communities. If journalists are to avoid getting lost in deciding what to read and who to rely on when navigating a complex domain, they must make use of their unique access to such informal judgements. The opportunity to speak to multiple top experts with diverse perspectives is the journalist’s most valuable asset in overcoming their relative ignorance.

Importantly, the project also introduces the journalist and philosopher Vanessa Schipani’s work on trust in science, particularly her Responsiveness Model.

Schipani challenges the assumption that consensus is always the appropriate basis for public trust, especially in policy-relevant contexts. But when science is summoned for policy decisions, it is uncertain and contested more often than not. The expectation that scientific advice should be objective (that is near certain and value free) then provides fertile ground for distrust and discrediting accusations of bias. Schipani, however, argues that trust in policy-relevant science can be warranted even in the absence of a robust consensus, provided that scientific advice is epistemically responsive to evidence and alternatives, and – crucially – also responsive to public values. For journalism, this shifts the focus from policing perceived agreement to explaining science as a process and demanding responsiveness from scientific experts – both to the evidence and with regards to the value choices that guide their conclusions.

These arguments suggest that journalism’s democratic role is not to eliminate disagreement or defer unquestioningly to expertise, but to critically mediate between expert knowledge and public reasoning, especially at the intersection between science and policy. For a more in-depth explanation, download the PDF with the full project.