Framing science

This paper reports on our efforts to understand the media representation of science in Britain and Germany using the corpora of science news newly compiled for the project Mapping the Cultural Authority of Science (MACAS). Our aim was to explore the representation of science and scientists without limiting ourselves to any particular domain of investigation, i.e. without looking at science reporting in relation to health, for example, or space exploration, or engineering, etc. This, of course, simultaneously posed a challenge: we couldn’t pay attention to tensions, controversies, competing discourses and frames that were specific to such domains and issues. Instead, we tried to probe very generally into what science reporting seems to have in common across all these more specific areas. We wanted to know what beliefs about science appear to dominate public discourse and how scientists are represented as social actors regardless of specific discipline affiliations. As we were looking to compare the two contexts on the basis of a qualitative analysis, our paper didn’t delve into distinctions within either of the two corpora. In aiming for this general level, we have, without doubt, denied ourselves interesting observations. We hope that what we say here, even when it simply confirms our intuitions, will illuminate the defaults against which, perhaps, other conceptions of science could be juxtaposed.