NIH grants are awarded to institutions, not individual investigators. That structure disappears from Science’s public framing. A dispute over funding awarded to institutions becomes a story about the personal speech rights of individual researchers. The institutions’ control over the grants, their exercise of authority over researchers, and their own speech policies and practices receive no examination. Instead, Science presents a newly filed complaint containing unproven allegations across its headline, subheadline, and social media promotion. The opposing views are completely absent. The government likely has established arguments supporting its authority to define federal programs, impose conditions on public funds, and decline to subsidize activities that conflict with other legal obligations. Science foregrounded the individual-rights theory, turning a dispute over institutional funding into an activist narrative.