A man in his 30s is dead in Madison, Wisconsin — shot by a police officer Wednesday after, police say, he pulled a knife during a struggle and injured the officer. That's the event, one sentence, done. Our beat is what happened to it on the way to your screen. * Here's AP's headline: "Wisconsin police officer shoots, kills man on city street near state Capitol in Madison." Subject: officer. Verbs: shoots, kills. Object: man. You can diagram it in fourth grade. Somebody did something to someone, and the sentence says who. * Now CNN's: "Fatal police shooting of man officials say was armed with knife prompts investigation and protests in Wisconsin." Read it again — slower. There is no shooter in that sentence. The actor is "fatal police shooting," a noun, and the only thing it actively does is "prompt an investigation." The officer has evaporated into an adjective. A man dies in the headline and the grammar treats it like weather. * CNN's opening line keeps the same posture: "A man was shot and killed in a struggle with police officers." Was shot. The dead man gets to be the subject — but only of the passive voice, only of the thing done to him. * Let's be exact about what we're not saying. Police say there was a knife. An officer was injured — that's real, and it may well mean the shooting is ruled justified. But here's the thing: AP printed every one of those same facts directly under its active verbs. "Officer shoots, kills man" and "he pulled a knife" fit in the same story. Accuracy never required the passive. The passive is a choice you make on top of the facts, not because of them. * Meanwhile the community is asking a question that active voice answers and passive voice dodges: who. The dead man's name hasn't been released. The officer's name hasn't either. Protesters marched to the state Capitol asking for both, and community organizer Brandi Grayson put it in one line quoted in AP's own story: "Another Black man is dead on a Madison street, and our community watched him die before we even knew his name." * Both headlines are technically true. Only one of them has a person in it. When the state investigation delivers its verdict months from now, remember which outlets needed the grammar checked before anyone checked the facts.