Science and the media

Science as the enterprise engaged in the knowledge-acquiring of reality has gone through a long and complex historical development. As new technologies came to rise, too did the social importance of science in various areas; it often serves as the explanatory frameworkofunderstanding the reality itself. This master's thesis explores the often complicated relationship between scientific discourse and the mass media. This means examining various historical connections and similarities, such as the common relation to the industrial revolution, and also demonstrating important disparities between science and media in relation to knowledge management, perception of authority figures and methods of reality representations. Firstly, this thesis investigates the possibility of employing various methods of media and communication studies to betterunderstand the representation of science in the media (including news values, routines, framing, agenda settingetc.) and summarizes the state of science communicationin general as well as in the Czech Republic. In the second part, the representation of science is researched through quantitative analysis of selected Czech mass media (print: MF DNES and Právo, on-line: iDNES.cz and Novinky.cz) with emphasis on the framing, the work with sources, framing and referring..