Euronews' Tuesday-morning headline on the Hormuz war manages two grammatical moods in one sentence: "Tanker attacked in Strait of Hormuz as US strikes Iran for tenth consecutive night." The US part is active voice — subject named, verb thrown. The tanker? Just "attacked." By whom? The headline pleads the fifth. * Here's the thing: Euronews knows exactly who did it. Paragraph three of its own story has Iran's Revolutionary Guard claiming credit for hitting air defence systems, and by paragraph five the IRGC is openly boasting it stopped "two non-compliant oil tankers" in the strait after explosions set them burning. The perpetrator didn't leave fingerprints. He called a press conference. * When the attacker is unknown, "tanker attacked" is caution, and caution is good. When the attacker is publicly claiming the attack, the passive voice stops being caution and starts being a habit. Al Jazeera — not exactly the outlet you'd nominate as hawkish on Iran — put "Tehran attacks Gulf states" straight into its live-blog headline the same morning. Named subject, active verb, done. * And there's a second tell in the Euronews piece, leaning the other way. The American strikes are described as hitting command centers and launch sites "to degrade Iran's ability to continue attacking commercial vessels." That "to degrade" is CENTCOM's stated purpose, typed out as narration. So within one article, Iran's violence loses its author and America's violence gains a mission statement. * We don't think Euronews is carrying anyone's water on purpose. This is what wire-speed war coverage looks like: the grammar defaults to whatever shape the press releases arrived in. Iran's attack came as an unclaimed explosion at 5am; the Pentagon's came with a purpose clause attached. Both got typeset as-is. * But ten nights in, the entire question of this war is who is escalating on whom. A headline that can't name an attacker its own paragraph five quotes isn't neutral on that question. It's just late.