Abstract
What makes societies see, acknowledge, and constitute an issue as a crisis which should be acted upon? We address this by examining a specific instance of media attention to a creeping health crisis, namely the communication of an individual non-governmental actor, the influencer Ingeborg Senneset. We ask: What is the rhetorical agency of an individual opinion leader (influencer) in a health risk situation such as the creeping AMR-crisis?
Our study demonstrates that the rhetorical agency of Senneset as an influencer rests on three interrelated communicative strategies: First, she enacts what we term a multiple ethos implying both the expertise of a professional and the authenticity of an ordinary person; Second, she uses narratives of fear with a rational grounding; Third, she establishes and works rhetorically within a diverse digital ecology where she publishes, posts, and comments on several different platforms, where the different posts and publications reinforce each other.