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Public Communication of Technoscience (PCTS) is a complex activity highly dependent on context. In spite of the fact that it includes a wide variety of contents, strategies, formats, values, intentions and functions, in practice and in general, attempts have been made to reduce it to a mere mechanism of linear transmission of original knowledge from a domain of authority (the scientific), which selects and spreads strategic content to a lay domain (the public), which in turn receives the scientific information in an undifferentiated and passive way. This "dominant view" of PCTS has not only been generated, supported and managed by scientists and scientific institutions, but it has been reproduced by science journalists and communicators. This paper asserts that the practice of popularizing science is a political strategy for scientists and scientific institutions and it tries to reveal the purpose of this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]