Two American service members were killed when Iranian missiles and drones hit a base in Jordan. Here's how that fact dressed for work at different outlets. CNN: "Two US service members killed, one missing following Iranian strikes in Jordan." Fox: "Two US service members killed in Iranian strikes on Jordan, CENTCOM says." And RT: "Two US service members killed in Iranian retaliatory strikes – Pentagon." * That dash at the end is RT's house style for sourcing — it means "the Pentagon is the source for this sentence." Now look at what's riding along in the middle of the sentence the Pentagon supposedly sourced: "retaliatory." * CENTCOM's actual statement says the two died in action "as CENTCOM and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks." No "retaliatory" anywhere in it — militaries do not describe attacks that kill their own people as somebody's justified payback. "Retaliatory" is Tehran's framing of the night. In RT's headline, it sits inside a sentence attributed, by dash, to the Pentagon. * And the word is doing real work. Retaliation is a transaction — it requires an original sin, a first mover, a debt being settled. Write "Iranian strikes" and the reader asks what happened. Write "Iranian retaliatory strikes" and the reader has already been told why it happened and whose fault it was, before the first paragraph loads. One adjective turns a casualty report into a moral ledger with the balance pre-computed. * Same front page, other direction: "IRGC claims strikes on US drone depot and AI hub in Bahrain." When Iran's version of events needs a flag on it, RT knows exactly where the word "claims" lives. The distancing toolkit is fully stocked — it just gets deployed with a compass. * To be fair to headline writers everywhere: compression is the job, and no one-line summary of a war survives contact with the war. But there's a difference between compressing the night and pre-loading the verdict. When the justification arrives smuggled inside the adjective, the trial happened before you clicked.