The Grammar That Deletes the Doer

The agentless passive is a sentence constructed so an action occurs without anyone performing it: things “are rolled back,” “have begun,” “were offered,” and the sentence never says by whom. It is not the passive voice in general, which has legitimate uses; it’s the passive voice specifically deployed where a named actor could have gone and didn’t. Orwell flagged it in “Politics and the English Language” as one of the standard ways political prose dodges responsibility for what it describes.

• A tribute piece for Gloria Steinem quoted a mourner saying abortion rights “are being rolled back,” full stop, no agent named, in an obituary that elsewhere states plainly that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Rolled back by whom, when the same outlet already knows the answer?
• A French celebrity domestic-violence story does the identical trick in its own voice, not a quote: “les violences ont débuté” (“the violence began”), as though it arrived like weather rather than from a named man three paragraphs away describing his own conduct.
• A report on AI-regulation policy runs a whole cluster of the same device in one piece: “legislation was introduced,” “there is mounting pressure to regulate AI technology,” “female MPs… had reportedly pushed for stronger action.” Every clause names an outcome and skips the person who caused it, so an entire policy fight reads as weather nobody made.
• The modal version. A report on a pre-Budget speech noted the chancellor “could be forced to increase taxes or cut spending,” where “forced” hides who is doing the forcing as completely as any passive would. When the choice is grammatically compulsory, the choosing disappears, and the cuts arrive later sounding like arithmetic rather than a decision anyone made.
• A coal-record story blamed a world consumption record on “the war in the Middle East,” “the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz,” and “fears over LNG supply security,” naming no belligerent and no blockading party across the whole piece. Even the cited agency’s own sentence had no actor: “the disruption nevertheless had repercussions on those energy markets” — the disruption itself doing the acting. Not one country, company, or buyer was named as having burned the coal.
• A prime minister’s despatch-box speech, quoted in full, ran almost entirely in agentless clauses: “Political power was centralised, economic power privatised. The country deindustrialised. Austerity followed.” Power was centralised by whom, deindustrialisation happened as though by weather, austerity arrived the way night follows day — a speech about restoring agency to hollowed-out communities delivered in sentences where nobody does anything.
• A candidate profile described his proposed constitutional overhaul, in the reporter’s own voice, as restoring a republic “which had been profoundly distorted” — no agent named for who distorted it, or when, letting the outlet skip the one question, by whom, that the entire proposal exists to answer.
• A government agency’s statement said shared data “is consistent with the restrictions agreed with the provisioning agency” — agreed by whom, dated when, is left open, and the agency then named the other agency as “responsible for articulating” those same restrictions, so that no clause in either statement is ever the one where a person actually sets a rule.
• Three outlets on two continents ran the identical headline formula, “[performer] dropped from tour after ‘[speech]’,” for a removal a billionaire stadium owner had already confirmed, on the record, that he personally engineered. The passive verb and the “after” clause assigned the cause to the speech itself; the man who said he made the call did not appear in a single headline.
• A French follow-up article, translating the same story, wrote in its own voice that the performer “a été lâché par les autres artistes participant à sa tournée” (“was dropped by the other artists on his tour”) — dropped by whom, decided by whom, left unnamed a second time, in a second language, by a desk that never checked the construction it was translating.
• A broadcaster’s newsroom, covering its own employer’s edit to an archive, closed by noting that comedians’ work has been edited “as societal attitudes have shifted” and that “times have changed.” Someone at the broadcaster made the decision; in the sentence, it was the times.
• A cyber-attack on a police force was reported as “The incident occurred on September 14.” Attacks do not occur like weather; they are carried out. None of the four outlets named a type of attack, a suspect or a motive, and the force’s refusal to clarify appeared in one of them.
• A French murder report, repeated at two outlets, said the victim died “sur le trajet de l’hôpital” (“on the way to hospital”) after “un contexte confus” (“a confused situation”). Both are accurate, and together they detach the death from the scene and reattach it to the ambulance.
• Seven articles on a child’s death all headlined “a gap in the fence” and “an open gate”: the gate was open, but nobody opened it, and the fence has a gap nobody made, owns or inspects. The grammar left no slot for whoever is responsible for the fence.
• A report on a withdrawn lawsuit said the accuser “was unaware of the lawsuit being filed on her behalf.” The filer vanished from the filing, in a case whose remaining litigation turns on exactly who filed what, and what they knew before doing it.
• A food-price story told readers that “Households have already been warned to brace themselves for higher prices” and that “Families have already been warned some produce could be in short supply.” Warned by whom, the sentences never say; warnings arrive like weather.
• A court report, printed near-identically by three outlets, said “a crew member was on the boat whilst it was heard leaking air.” Heard by whom, and where, the sentence hides its own subject, in a story where the person nearest the knife was the rescuer aboard.
• A French report on a drinking-water scandal was told entirely in procedure, “une information judiciaire a été ouverte,” “plusieurs juges d’instruction viennent d’être désignés,” while the UN experts it cited in passing name who is responsible: “private operators, local authorities and the State.” The judicial passive is ordinary register; the effect is a scandal in which nobody does anything.