Education Experts : Agents of Contemporary Educational Discourse?

Abstract More and more experts from the social sciences are appearing in the media to provide expert opinions on media coverage of events and social issues. However, with regard to the conditions under which media content is produced, a growing number of voices have been pointing to the fact that quasi-experts with a media interest tend to speak more in the media than scientifically trained scholars. This article conducts an analysis of media outputs to examine whether this criticism is relevant to the field of education in the Czech media landscape, and the analysis shows that in almost half of cases the so-called “education experts” commenting on education in the media were quasi-experts – people to whom the authority and status to speak on education is attributed by the media – rather than scholarly experts. The analysis results in a classification of experts on education speaking in the Czech media – they usually choose similar rhetoric and accentuate only selected educational topics.