A Ukrainian drone hit a ship in the Caspian Sea this weekend, and a sailor was killed. Before a single headline got written, every newsroom had to answer one question: what was that ship carrying? Nobody agrees. So the adjectives went to war instead. * RT's headline: "Iran condemns Ukraine over 'reckless' cargo ship attack." Notice what the event is in that sentence. Not the strike — the condemnation. Iran's press release is the news; the attack is a subordinate clause. "Reckless" gets the marquee spot, wearing quotation marks like a hi-vis vest so RT can shout it without technically saying it. And the boat itself is just "a cargo ship." Cargo unspecified. * Al Jazeera went with: "Iran accuses Ukraine of deadly attack on Caspian commercial vessel." The verb is careful — "accuses" keeps AJ's hands clean. But look at the noun it let through: "commercial vessel." That's Tehran's manifest, stamped straight into the headline. And whether that one word is true is literally the entire dispute. * Because here's Ukraine's version, which both outlets quote: Zelenskyy said Kyiv struck "vessels used in military cargo shipments involving Iran, as well as a warship." One side's boat is a commercial vessel minding its own business. The other side's boat is a supply run for a war that's currently on its fifth month. The gap between those two descriptions is the gap between an atrocity and a military target — and each headline quietly picked a side before you got to paragraph one. * Our favorite detail is in RT's own text. It relays Iran's foreign ministry insisting that "Iran has never intervened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict" — and then, a few paragraphs away, RT itself recalls that Iran's foreign minister confirmed in 2022 that Tehran delivered a "small number" of Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to Russia. That is one heavily load-bearing "never." Kyiv's air-raid sirens would like to check the paperwork on "small number," too. * And Iran's statement — which RT prints in full voice — calls the strike an act of "the Ukrainian regime." Governments Iran likes get called governments. The other kind get called regimes, and RT passes the vocabulary along like it's just carrying the mail. * When a war spreads to a new sea, the first casualty is the cargo manifest. Watch the nouns this week: "cargo ship" on RT, "commercial vessel" via Tehran and AJ, "military cargo shipments" from Kyiv. Same hull. Three completely different boats, depending on who filled out the paperwork.