Saturday evening, at the Salsa on St. Clair festival in Toronto — about 13,000 people out for the biggest Latin street party in Canada — six people were shot and two of them died. Suspects are still at large. That's the event. Here's how it read. * CNN: "Two killed in mass shooting at Canada's largest Latin street festival in Toronto, police say." Fox News: "Gunfire shatters Toronto Latin street festival, leaving at least 2 dead and multiple wounded." * Now read both again and try to find a human being firing a gun. There isn't one. In CNN's version a "mass shooting" simply occurs, like weather. In Fox's version the weather is the whole story — "gunfire shatters," bullets arriving authorless, a very local hailstorm. * What the police actually said sits inside both articles. Deputy Chief Frank Barredo: "This seemed to be an exchange of gunfire between two individuals targeting each other" — one that, in his words, "indiscriminately put vast numbers of people in danger." * On the arithmetic, CNN is on solid ground: six people shot clears the standard four-victim threshold, so "mass shooting" is technically defensible. The problem is the seasoning. That "police say" hangs at the end of a headline built around a phrase the police didn't use. The police described two people shooting at each other; the headline reaches for a category readers file next to the worst American nights. * Fox solved a different problem by removing the people entirely. "Gunfire shatters" is the agentless-verb school of gun coverage — the sentence you build when you'd rather the bullets had no owners. Fox found the shooter-free construction; CNN found the biggest available noun and hung a badge on it. * When suspects are unknown, grammar does the police sketch. One desk drew a massacre, one drew a storm front — and the police drew the dullest, most accurate picture of all: two individuals with guns in a crowd of 13,000. Sometimes the least dramatic sentence is the honest one.