Weaponized Legitimacy: How Alternative Experts Exploit Media Attention To Claim Scientific Authority

Public trust in scientific institutions has eroded steadily in recent decades, creating conditions in which media visibility increasingly competes with formal credentials as a basis for authority in science-adjacent policy domains. This thesis examines how that competition was not only exploited but actively engineered in the 2025 reconstitution of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the committee’s entire membership and replaced it with figures whose prominence derived primarily from alternative media ecosystems rather than institutional scientific affiliations. Drawing on scholarship on the hybrid media system, manufactured doubt, and the science-politics legitimacy framework, this thesis introduces the concept of weaponized legitimacy — a communicative strategy that exploits the signifiers of scientific expertise, including credentials, citations, methodological vocabulary, and claims to data-driven reasoning, while systematically undermining the institutional accountability structures that give those signifiers meaning. Through a qualitative theoretical case study and close reading of one primary media artifact per panelist, the analysis identifies four sub-mechanisms through which weaponized legitimacy operates: credential laundering, in which actors stretch domain-specific authority into unrelated epistemic terrain; corrosive skepticism, in which actors deploy the formal conventions of scientific reasoning to destabilize rather than advance consensus; censorship martyrdom, in which actors convert platform enforcement of misinformation policies into persecution narratives that generate surrogate credibility; and grassroots populist authority, in which actors substitute performed proximity to ordinary communities for institutional validation. Together, these mechanisms constitute a communicative practice that is both a symptom of the deinstitutionalization of expertise and one of its primary drivers — making the ACIP appointments not merely a political outcome but an analytical window onto how scientific authority is being actively remade in the contemporary hybrid media environment.