Our job here isn't to tell you a 4-year-old faced a deportation judge alone. Plenty of outlets already told you that. Our job is to grade HOW they told you — because the words a newsroom picks decide whether you flinch or just keep scrolling. Quick facts so we're square: more than 400,000 immigrant kids have gone through U.S. immigration court with no lawyer, after the Trump administration cut the program that paid for their attorneys. A child with a lawyer is roughly 100 times more likely to be allowed to stay. In New York, 96% of people without one are eventually deported. Now watch two newsrooms cover the exact same thing. Gothamist ran it straight — '4-year-old migrant girl, other kids go to court with no lawyer' — and put the money line right in the headline: 'the cruelty is apparent.' The Nation named the hand on the switch: 'Trump Wants Thousands of Migrant Children to Represent Themselves in Court.' That's journalism with a pulse. Then there's ABC News, which reached for the bureaucratic tranquilizer: 'unaccompanied minors are representing themselves… alarming advocates.' Read it again. 'Unaccompanied minors,' not kids. And the cruelty isn't a fact anymore — it's just a thing 'advocates' find 'alarming,' one opinion among many. Same courtroom, same 4-year-old. One headline made you look; the other handed you permission to move on. We're not asking anyone to bury the story. We're asking why the soft, sleepy phrasing is still house style at outlets big enough to know exactly what they're doing.