The United States spent Wednesday launching its fourth straight day of strikes on Iran — two separate waves before dinner, part of a campaign that has run to hundreds of strikes in a week. That's your one sentence of what happened. Here's how NPR told it. * The headline: "The U.S. launches another wave of strikes on Iran as the Hormuz standoff intensifies." A standoff. Like two neighbors glaring at each other over a hedge. Except one neighbor is flying waves of airstrikes, and the hedge is on fire. * Paragraph two of NPR's story is handed, in full, to the people doing the striking: "The strikes are targeting Iranian military capabilities used to threaten vessels freely transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, an international waterway vital to global commerce," said U.S. Central Command. Properly quoted, properly attributed — and placed so high up that the Pentagon is effectively narrating the story. * Now the part that made us sit up. There IS a death toll in NPR's piece. One. Kpler — described by NPR as "a company that tracks maritime traffic" — reporting "56 confirmed incidents and 17 seafarer fatalities." The only human beings who die in NPR's account of a bombing campaign arrive via cargo-logistics data, in a passage that also itemizes the crude, the liquefied petroleum gas, the methanol and the iron ore. * The people underneath the strikes? No number. Not a big number, not a disputed number, not even an "Iran claims" number. Nothing. Al Jazeera, the same day, did it in one clause: the strikes are "killing at least 35 people and wounding 300, according to Iranian health officials." That's the whole technique — a figure and a source, and the reader decides what to make of it. NPR clearly knows the move; it used it for the shipping company. * There's even a quote in NPR's piece from Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, saying U.S. forces are "holding Iran accountable for unwarranted aggression that continues to endanger innocent lives." So innocent lives are in the story — endangered, invoked, defended. Just never counted. * We're not asking NPR to take Tehran's numbers on faith. Attribute them and move on — the way Al Jazeera did, the way NPR itself did for the iron ore. But when your war coverage carries a more detailed manifest for the methanol than for the dead, "standoff" stops sounding like caution and starts sounding like a choice.