ABSTRACT
“They keep saying: ‘We’re going to listen to the science.’ But they’re not – they’re listening to the scientists. The science is what you make of it.”
Iain Duncan Smith, quoted in The Telegraph (Fisher & Knapton, 2021).
In February 2021, the U.K. government outlined its ‘roadmap out of lockdown’ (U.K. Government, 22 February 2021), in which it stressed that decisions would be guided ‘by data, not dates’. This highlights the role that scientific evidence has in informing policymaking; however, in the quote above, British MP Iain Duncan Smith is critical of the government's hesitancy to ease restrictive measures, arguing that the scientific data is open to interpretation, both by the government members and the scientists who advise them. This quote raises questions about the objective status attributed to science and scientific research. In this chapter, we explore how the news media in the U.K. discuss ‘the science’, which is often ascribed agency and influence, as if a monolithic entity. We discuss the principles of systemic functional linguistics and apply a transitivity analysis to demonstrate how researchers can uncover the linguistic attribution of power and agency at the level of the clause.
