Public Lecture by Daniel C. Hallin

”We are all in this together”

Contradictions of pandemic biocommunicability in the age of populism

The COVID pandemic represented a grave threat to the health and well-being of the whole society. Health officials and media both tried to promote social solidarity in the face of that threat. The effort was, to a significant extent, unsuccessful in the United States and challenging everywhere. Professor Hallin will discuss two reasons for this. The first has to do with politicization. In the United States, populist leadership in politics and media followed the common populist strategy of polarization, interpreting the pandemic response as a political assault on the populist leader by his political enemies and as an assault by elites on individual liberty and economic prosperity. Beyond this, however, the pandemic illustrates the inherently political character of a health emergency, as the decisions affect all social life and involve choices that go far beyond biomedical science. A second set of arguments concerns the difficulty of advocating for collective health in a cultural environment where individualistic conceptions of health are dominant.

Daniel C. Hallin is a Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting professor at the Department of Communication and Media at Lund University. His research is widely known and highly important to media and communication studies. He has written on the media and war, on television coverage of elections, and the rise and decline of journalist professionalism. Recently, Professor Hallin has been researching the social and cultural impacts of COVID-19 and examined the nature and impact of pandemic communication in the context of populist politics.