When a preprint on COVID-19 transmission (chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin) circulated without peer review in early 2020, media outlets around the world ran headlines treating it as a confirmed scientific finding. These media reports were also used by politicians to justify a series of policies to combat the spread of the virus during the pandemic. The circulation and amplification of this media content sparked debate in the public digital sphere.
Within days, these findings were refuted by researchers in the field. The scientists’ corrections were not merely conveyed quietly via group chats, but were also amplified on social media by “visible scientists” with large followings. However, the digital space at that time was already characterised by the echo chamber effect and severe polarisation of opinion. The situation I described at the time was a contestation of uncertainty, a state characterised by uncertainty and contestation between actors, where the resulting debates often led to an erosion of public trust in both journalistic and academic institutions.
Yet the situation described is not a story of institutional journalistic failure or the “arrogance” of the scientific community. It is a portrait of two institutions operating under different logics, with insufficient space for each side to understand the other.
Science moves slowly and cautiously, weighing claims against evidence gathered over many years. Digital journalism moves in a matter of hours, governed by news value and audience attention. When these two timeframes collide in an emergency, the result is misunderstanding. It is a systematic erosion of the public’s ability to assess risk.
In a theoretical essay recently published in Observatorio, I argue that the standard response to this problem — better science communication training, clearer press releases, researchers who are more media-savvy — is necessary but not sufficient. What is missing is something more fundamental concerning a commitment to two-way reflexivity: a reciprocal process in which both scientists and journalists examine their own epistemic assumptions, rather than merely criticising each other’s failures.
More than copying and conveying a message
The dominant model of science communication still assumes that the main challenge is translating scientific messages and the process of their transmission; in other words, taking complex scientific findings and making them understandable to a non-specialist audience. This framework, often referred to as the deficit model, is based on the premise that the public lacks knowledge and that journalists act as ‘neutral’ intermediaries between scientific findings in the laboratory and the coffee shop.
Although it still functions in certain contexts, the deficit model has been empirically challenged for decades. The argument is that public scepticism towards science does not correlate directly with a lack of knowledge about scientific findings. Nevertheless, this model persists in being used by institutions that train scientists to communicate (science communication) and in the way newsrooms commission science coverage that relies on scientists as primary sources.
On the scientists’ side, they receive only minimal communication training throughout their careers, despite increasing demands from funders to demonstrate the public impact of research. Research by Swords et al. (2023) found that only 51% of scientists had ever communicated with a non-expert audience prior to formal training, suggesting that the barriers are institutional rather than attitudinal. This situation is undoubtedly worse in countries lacking substantial resources for research and public engagement budgets.
On the journalistic side, dedicated science desks are shrinking (at the very least, column space is dwindling). Economic pressures under platform capitalism have restructured editorial incentives around click metrics and engagement optimisation, accelerating production cycles that are already too fast to handle careful, in-depth coverage of scientific findings. Journalists (particularly digital ones) are increasingly reliant on press releases and algorithmically curated content rather than direct engagement with researchers. As generative AI tools enter newsroom workflows, the risks grow: AI-generated summaries can reproduce errors, reduce uncertainty, and fabricate quotes that go undetected by human editors in time.
In the Global South, where I situate much of my analysis, this is exacerbated by structural conditions largely overlooked in Western science communication literature. In Indonesia, scientific topics are predominantly covered by generalist journalists without specialised training, operating within newsrooms shaped by media conglomerates with limited editorial independence.
For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government’s ‘poor’ messaging at the start of the pandemic, weak coordination between the Ministry of Health and research institutions, and an information overload, combined to produce a crisis of trust in both science and the media simultaneously. The situation in the Philippines is not so different; a tradition of investigative journalism coexists with the near-absence of institutionalised science journalism, so that science coverage is reduced to a public relations function serving institutional agendas rather than deliberative public knowledge. The situation described here is highly dependent on institutional capacity; whilst there are efforts within specialised media projects, their scale is likely to remain limited.
It is within this context that the issue of structural asymmetry is important to discuss, as it reveals that the science-journalism interface is not a neutral space awaiting better methods and techniques of communication to present scientific topics. This situation is, in fact, a politically and economically conditioned relationship, and any framework to improve it must honestly take these conditions into account.
A Framework for Two-Way Reflexivity in Scientist-Journalist Collaboration
What reflexivity actually requires
Two-way reflexivity is not a metaphor for mutual respect for roles. I regard it as an analytical ‘demand’ with institutional implications.
For scientists, this demands an acknowledgement that communicating uncertainty, the provisional nature of science, and methodological complexity are not rhetorical weaknesses to be minimised before release to the public. For instance, when scientists strip away the caveats from their findings to produce a ‘cleaner’ media narrative, they do not necessarily make science more accessible.
They actually make it more misleading. The preprint crisis at the start of the pandemic was not a failure of journalism to understand scientific work. It was partly a failure of scientific communication norms that treat public engagement as something downstream and separate from the research process itself.
For journalists, reflexivity requires more than mere fact-checking of scientific sources. It demands an examination of the epistemological assumptions embedded within narrative formats. The tendency to cover science by covering both sides is, in reality, a false balance. This situation arises from assumptions that treat scientific consensus and rejection of science (including anti-intellectualism) as equal perspectives, a dramatisation of conflict that makes science appear more controversial than it actually is, as well as structural ambiguity and uncertainty in narrative forms that demand resolution. Brüggemann and Engesser’s analysis, for example, of climate coverage demonstrates how this tendency produces systematic distortions of science even when journalists individually present two perspectives in good faith for the public.
The framework of two-way reflexivity that I propose operates across four dimensions. Epistemologically, both scientists and journalists must question who is considered a legitimate producer of knowledge and on what basis. This is particularly urgent in the context of the Global South, where research agendas and publication norms from the Northcontinue to dominate, and where local knowledge systems are systematically ‘dismissed’. Institutionally, reflexivity requires organisational reform, not merely changes in individual attitudes: science media centres, integrated journalism programmes within research institutions, and editorial guidelines for science communication amidst scientific uncertainty. Communicatively, this demands collaborative protocols on how scientific findings are framed and for whom they are produced—whether for the public or private entities. Structurally, this means actively opposingepistemic extraction, where research from the Global South only gains global visibility when filtered through Northern institutional frameworks.
Existing spaces that need to be expanded
There is reason for optimism, but caution and diligence remain essential. Platforms such as The Conversation Indonesia demonstrate that scientific norms regarding verification, context and depth can be integrated into journalistic practice without sacrificing accessibility or timeliness. Whilst opportunities remain, there is still a risk of the mediatisation and platformisation of science. In much journalistic work, collaborative investigations between journalists and researchers in Indonesia have already taken place on issues ranging from deforestation to the risks of zoonotic diseases, demonstrating what context-sensitive co-production looks like in these collaborative practices.
Regarding the discussion about the platform, Indonesia has The Conversation Indonesia, although this media outlet originated in Australia and has a global network. Practices in Indonesia differ from those of the global network. Here, journalists and scientists have the opportunity to play a role and exchange ideas in the formation of a shared framing, rather than merely acting as translators of science articles. (Image: The Conversation Indonesia website)
The emergence of scientist-influencers (also known as The Visible Scientist) on social media platforms is a more ambiguous development. Scientists who communicate directly with a wide audience not only “bypass” journalistic mediation, but they also bypass the verification and accountability structures inherent in professional journalism at its best. In countries where professional science journalism is weak or non-existent, these individuals become the primary source of scientific information for millions of people, without the institutional support structures to help them navigate the responsibility of maintaining public trust in science. This is not to mention the issue of non-affiliated researchers whose work is entirely unaccountable to ethical constraints and institutional norms.
The challenges of science communication involving these two key actors—journalists and scientists—do not lie in the dichotomy between speed and accuracy, or between scientific authority and journalistic independence. The challenge is to create institutional structures where speed can be consciously balanced against epistemic values, and where scientists and journalists are trained to recognise their own blind spots rather than merely identifying those of the other party.
‘Peripheral’ media such as Project Multatuli also often serve as examples of how two-way reflexivity is practised in in-depth science reporting through investigations involving both journalists and scientists. (Image: Project-M website)
Such a recalibration will not occur merely through workshops and communication training for both parties. It requires further investment in interdisciplinary education, collaborative editorial infrastructure, and the “political” will to treat science journalism as a democratic necessity for the public’s access to scientific truth, not merely as an additional feature within the media landscape. Scientists and journalists need to stop treating each other as a problem and start treating each other as partners in the production of public knowledge, even under conditions not entirely controlled by either party.
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Ilham Akhsanu Ridlo is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication and Media, LMU Munich, and a lecturer at the Faculty of Public Health, Airlangga University. His research focuses on scientist-journalist relations and science communication in Indonesia.
