“…According to an understanding widely spread in the literature, the media would have the ability to influence public perceptions and attitudes, either by inducing priorities in the public agenda -and indirectly, the political one-(agenda-setting), or by describing and signifying these issues within certain frames (framing), that is, by giving more weight to certain aspects of reality, promoting a certain causal interpretation, moral evaluation or recommendation of treatment, or holding a specific These approaches, however, also tend to attribute a hierarchical superiority to scientific consensus over the descriptions proposed by the mass media, therefore observing the latter in terms of their -more or less distorted-ability to represent scientific ideas, and thus criticizing the 'excessive' attention mass media give to events and contrasts of a political nature or to minority-held scientific theories and debates (Blanco, Quesada & Teruel, 2013;Nygrén, Lyytimäki & Tapio, 2012). Conceptualizing public opinion through notions such as public scepticism (Zhou, 2015) or understanding/information gaps (Nisbet, Cooper & Ellithorpe, 2014) seems to presuppose the objectivity of scientific understanding, something which has become quite difficult to maintain within the current crisis of positivist epistemologies (Guba & Lincoln, 1994); moreover, this suggests a one-dimensional understanding of public opinion, which does not value its internal differences, and implies an erroneous opposition between scientific rationality, on the one hand, and public ignorance or irrationality, on the other (Kurath & Gisler, 2009).…”