More than 300,000 people have now fled wildfires in France and Spain, at least three people are dead, and France is running what the Guardian calls one of the largest peacetime civilian evacuation operations in its history — Bordeaux's council is openly discussing evacuating the entire city. When something this big burns, every outlet writes the same second story: what's causing it. And that's where the coverage splits. * Fox's version of that story is an explainer headlined: "Europe's fires reveal deadly mix of record heat, human error, arson and land mismanagement." Four suspects, right there in the headline. Record heat. Careless people with cigarettes and campfires — France's agriculture ministry says nine out of ten fires start with a human. Arsonists. And regulations that "prohibit clearing of certain protected lands." * One word does not appear anywhere in the piece: climate. Not once. An entire investigation into why Europe keeps catching fire, whose lead ingredient is literally "record heat," written without the word every fire scientist on the continent keeps using. * And look at what did make Fox's suspect list in its place: "land mismanagement" — which, in the article's own telling, means environmental rules that stop people from clearing protected land. In this framing the protections are a culprit and the warming isn't in the room. That's not an accident of word count. Explainers are exactly the format where you have space for one more word. * Other newsrooms found the space. The Guardian's live blog says in its own voice that the blazes are "fuelled by persistent heatwaves and the climate crisis." Al Jazeera files its coverage under "Climate Crisis" and quotes the World Weather Attribution group — drought "blamed on human-fuelled climate change" has heightened this year's fire threat — though AJ parks that sentence in the final paragraph, where headlines go to be forgotten. * To be fair to the caution: "it was hot" and "the climate changed" are not the same claim, and single events need attribution science before you pin them on warming. But that science exists, it's fast, and it had already weighed in on this exact fire season. Quoting the agriculture ministry's cigarette statistics while skipping the attribution scientists isn't caution. It's casting. * Nine out of ten fires are started by a person — that stat is true, verified, and doing enormous work in Fox's piece. A person supplies the spark. What the spark lands on, and how fast it goes from spark to 42,000 hectares, is the part of the story Fox's suspect lineup was built not to answer.