New Jersey's DMV software registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote — people who, when a keypad asked if they were US citizens, answered "no" and got registered anyway. That's the whole event. Now watch what different outlets did with it. * NBC News went with: "6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in N.J. because of a 'software error,' governor says." Quote marks around the error, attribution to the governor, everyone's cards on the table. Bloomberg did the same thing: "NJ's Sherrill Says Software Error Registered 6,600 Noncitizens." Dry? Sure. But dry like a receipt — it tells you exactly what was purchased. * Fox's headline: "DOJ gives New Jersey 5 days to hand over voter data after noncitizen registration scandal." There it is. Scandal. No quote marks, no "governor says" — just a word doing a triple shift. Because a scandal needs a schemer, and the primary facts of this story are stubbornly schemer-free: Governor Mikie Sherrill said these people were registered "through no fault of their own" — the machine overrode the button they pressed. * Then there's the number escalator. The verified figures: 6,600 wrongly registered, fewer than 400 of them ever voted, and "no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed." Fox's piece rides that up to the Homeland Security secretary's claim that up to 35,000 noncitizens "may remain" on the rolls. May. That's not a finding, that's a weather forecast — but it's the biggest number in the story, so guess which one travels. * Think about who's actually in the frame here. Sixty-six hundred people did the single most honest thing you can do at a DMV: they told a machine they weren't citizens. The machine registered them anyway. That's like explicitly declining the gym membership and then finding your face on the poster for the gym membership scandal. * A software error gets fixed with a vendor swap — which is what Sherrill announced. A scandal gets fixed with five-day federal ultimatums and a Civil Rights Division probe. Fox's headline picked the second genre, and the word did the rest of the work on its own.