In late February, a US Tomahawk missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. Amnesty International counted more than 100 children among the dead. That is the entire background paragraph, because this piece is about what happened to the story afterwards — which is, carefully and deliberately, nothing. * CNN's Zachary Cohen published an exclusive today: nearly five months on, the Pentagon has never ordered the standard third-stage intelligence review that follows any noteworthy strike — the part where analysts actually examine the full body of satellite imagery and intelligence to establish what happened. CENTCOM, per CNN's sources, has “locked down” the investigation so tightly that only a handful of officers can see it. One source put it plainly: “The Pentagon was in damage control.” * Why skip your own homework? CNN's sources offer a precedent. The last time the Defense Intelligence Agency ran one of these reviews, it concluded the strikes on Iran's nuclear sites hadn't “obliterated” anything — contradicting the president's favourite word. The White House was furious. The DIA director lost his job. The review process didn't produce wrong answers. It produced answers. That was the problem. * Now to the coverage. Trump sat for an interview with Fox News and was asked whether he'd release the investigation's findings. His answers: “I don't think anybody is ever going to be able to say what happened there.” And — on satellite imagery showing fragments of an American missile at the school — it could be “AI generated.” No evidence offered. * How did Fox package the sitting president suggesting that documentation of a hundred dead children might be fake? Its video headline: “Trump discusses potential Iranian regime change and school strike investigation.” Discusses. The verb you'd use for a panel at a trade conference. * The strange part is that Fox's own fine print knows better. The video's description concedes the strike “killed over 100 children” and notes Trump “questions the images.” Everything the headline needed was sitting one layer down, already written, already fact-checked. It just wasn't allowed upstairs. * So here's the split screen. CNN spent months getting sources to confirm the review never happened. Fox had the commander-in-chief on camera, heard him say the evidence might be computer-generated, and filed it under “discusses.” One newsroom treated the story as something to dig up. The other treated it as something to sit through. * When a government announces that nobody will ever be able to say what happened, the entire job of a free press is to be the somebody.