Thursday night the president of the United States said, out loud and on camera, that networks declining to air his election speech should face "a revocation of their licenses." That's the story. Now watch what happens to it depending on who's typing. * The Washington Post went with the plain version: "Trump says ABC, NBC licenses should be revoked over refusal to air speech on election integrity." Subject: Trump. Verb: threatening. Object: the press. Grammar can be very clarifying when you let it. * Now Fox News: "ABC, NBC, CNN avoid airing Trump's primetime election security address live." Suddenly nobody is threatening anybody. The networks are the ones doing something — "avoiding," the way you avoid the gym, or your landlord. The threat itself doesn't make Fox's headline at all; it turns up down-page, safely zipped inside Trump's own quote marks: "Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses." * It gets better. Fox's news copy — the straight-news part, not an opinion column — describes how "the five liberal networks developed their own plans" for the speech. That's not reporting on the teams. That's picking one. * And Fox's opening line says the address covered "election security and apparent vulnerabilities during the 2020 election." Read that twice. "Apparent vulnerabilities" — the claims the other networks refused to amplify, quietly promoted to things that are apparently just there. The entire reason ABC, NBC and CNN sat this one out is that courts have been tossing those exact claims since 2020. * One legal footnote that deserves its own paragraph everywhere: ABC and NBC don't actually hold broadcast licenses. Their hundreds of local affiliate stations do — and most of those are owned by entirely different companies. Threatening "their licenses" is like threatening to revoke your neighbor's driver's licence because you're furious at his carpool. * So on Fox, a president promising to switch off his critics became a story about attendance — who showed up for the speech and who "avoided" it. Here's the tell to keep: when someone with the power to punish the press threatens the press, check who's the subject of the sentence. If it's not the guy making the threat, the headline desk made a choice.