Political polarization in the frequency British newspapers mention scientists with different views on COVID-19

Summary

This paper investigates whether the political leaning of UK newspapers shapes which COVID-19 scientists they cite, focusing on two opposing expert camps: signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD, favouring less precautionary non-pharmacological interventions) and authors of the John Snow Memorandum (JSM, favouring more precautionary measures). Combining MediaCloud mention counts across ten national newspapers with bibliometric co-authorship mapping and Twitter link-sharing analysis, the authors show that right-leaning outlets disproportionately cite GBD scientists while left-leaning outlets disproportionately cite JSM scientists, and that the two camps remain largely separated in academic and social media networks as well. They argue this reflects a political use of science by partisan media rather than political bias among the scientists themselves, and emphasise that — unlike many US cases — both UK groups consist of mainstream, credentialed researchers rather than fringe or misinformation-adjacent figures.

Key Contributions

• Empirical evidence of polarized media sourcing of scientists in UK COVID-19 coverage, extending a largely US-centric literature.
• A distinction between the UK case (mainstream scientists with differing precautionary views) and US polarization patterns that often involve fringe actors.
• A triangulated methodology combining media mention counts, co-authorship networks, and Twitter sharing of scientific publications.
• A conceptual reframing — drawing on Floridi — of polarization as media political use of science rather than scientists’ political bias.

Methods

The authors performed Boolean searches in MediaCloud UK National (Jan 2020–Oct 2021) for the 46 GBD signatories and 15 JSM-letter authors, filtering by COVID terms and institutional identifiers to disambiguate homonyms. Newspapers were classified by Brexit stance, 2019 election endorsement, and overall leaning; mention ratios were tested with two-tailed Fisher’s exact tests and Benjamini–Hochberg correction. They mapped 2020–2021 Web of Science co-authorship networks via VOSviewer, and used the Twitter academic API to extract scientific publications shared at least three times by 17 UK-based scientists from the two camps.

Findings

• 910 articles mentioned GBD signatories versus 2,553 mentioning JSM authors across UK national news.
• GBD/JSM mention ratios were 1.343 (Telegraph) and 0.868 (Express) at the right end versus 0.195 (Guardian) and 0.248 (Mirror) at the left, with several outlets significantly deviating from expected ratios (p<0.01 corrected).
• Co-authorship analysis showed a single connected cluster composed exclusively of JSM authors; GBD authors did not co-publish meaningfully with each other or with JSM authors during the period.
• On Twitter, the less-precautionary group shared 78 unique scientific publications and the more-precautionary group 133, with only one paper shared across both groups.
• Most-tweeted papers were typically authored by members of the sharing group, suggesting in-group self-promotion rather than cross-camp scientific dialogue.
• Shared publications showed no misinformation “red flags” (only one retraction), supporting the claim that both camps are mainstream science.

Connections

This paper contributes to a body of work on partisan asymmetries in media information ecosystems and audience exposure, resonating with foundational findings on ideological segregation in news sharing such as Bakshy2015-rn. Its focus on COVID-era science communication and the boundary between legitimate disagreement and problematic health information connects loosely to studies of fringe and misinformation actors like Efstratiou2025-gs and Efstratiou2026-ij, by contrast clarifying that the UK case sits on the legitimate-disagreement side of that boundary. The triangulation of bibliometric and social-media network evidence also shares methodological sensibilities with cross-platform polarization studies such as Bruns2023-039725ce.