“Guided by the science”: a keyword analysis of government ministers’ and scientists’ stance in the UK government’s COVID-19 press briefings

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government used TV press briefings, involving government ministers as well as scientific and medical experts to update the public on the spread of the virus, advances in understanding the disease, and preventive measures. These briefings provide a valuable linguistic resource to study how science is disseminated and used by scientists and politicians in emergency risk communication. To this end, a corpus has been compiled, consisting of transcripts of 150 briefings of approximately 100 h, with a total of 996,040 words. This study uses text dispersion keyness to derive keywords that characterize the discourse of scientists and politicians, respectively. Focusing on stance markers, the study reveals different rhetorical strategies for persuasion used by the two parties in public health emergency communication. Specifically, the scientists employ cautious reasoning and restrained confidence, while the ministers use a war-on-coronavirus narrative with unrestrained confidence, in the framing of the disease and scientific development.