NPR's headline on Wednesday's strikes: “U.S. fires a new wave of strikes on Iran and hits a tanker trying to skirt its blockade.” Let's give credit before we take it away. * The credit: “U.S. fires… and hits.” Active voice, shooter as subject. In a week when plenty of headlines have missiles simply materialising over Iran like weather, NPR named the actor twice. Genuinely better than the field. * Now the part that earns the column. “Trying to skirt its blockade.” That tanker — the Belma, Curaçao-flagged, empty, heading toward Kharg Island — has a motive in that sentence. It was TRYING something. Sneaky boat. And who established what the tanker was trying to do? CENTCOM. The people who shot it. * NPR's own article handles this correctly: the ship “ignored multiple warnings as it attempted to violate the U.S. blockade,” in quotation marks, attributed to the US military. That's the rulebook working. Then the headline lifted the military's mind-reading out of the quote marks and stated it as fact — the shooter's account of the victim's intentions, in NPR's voice, which is the version Google, push alerts and every skimming reader will carry around forever. * Sit with the word “disabled,” too — CENTCOM's term, faithfully relayed, for firing on a civilian oil tanker until it stops working. Your car isn't “disabled” by a missile. It's shot. “Disabled” is what happens to a parking brake. * Even the little possessive is doing quiet work: “ITS blockade.” Cosy. The blockade is just a thing the US owns now, like a boat or a labrador — not a contested act that the headline might want to hold at arm's length. * This is the oldest laundering trick in wire journalism: attribute in the body, adopt in the headline. The body is for the lawyers. The headline is for everyone else.