Science at FSV UK: Political scientist Tereza Plíštilová on global media coverage and difference of Czech positions

How do the media around the world frame the protests in the Middle East? And what are the specific attitudes of Czech society and political elites towards Israel and Palestine? Political scientist Tereza Plíštilová from the Institute of Political Studies FSV UK is looking for answers. Her research combines international relations with the latest methods in computational social science. “Thanks to large language models, we can now analyze questions that we were previously unable to answer. It allows us to systematically compare how different parts of the world interpret the same events,” she says in an interview.

Tereza Plíštilová is currently completing her doctoral studies at FSV UK. In her dissertation, she is interested in how the protests in the Middle East are framed in the media around the world and whether they are presented as a legitimate fight for better conditions or, on the contrary, as a security threat. To do this, she uses large language models, which have fascinated her in recent years and are experiencing a rapid rise in the social sciences. This allowed her to analyze a large amount of text – around three to four million articles published over several years. “This opens up new research possibilities and allows us to systematically compare how different parts of the world interpret the same events – not just protests, but also current conflicts and wars, such as the conflict in Gaza or Ukraine,” she says.

Read the full interview on our website about science at FSV UK, in which she also mentions what obstacles she encountered during her doctoral studies and how Czech positions on the conflict in the Middle East differ.