The Bank of England held interest rates at 3.75% today, fifth meeting in a row. A bank doing nothing, again — hard to make exciting. Unless you're writing the headline. * The BBC's: "Bank holds interest rates but says it is ready to raise them if Iran war escalates." Now there's a mortgage story with a pulse. A war! In your rate decision! Ready to raise! * Now scroll down the same BBC article to where governor Andrew Bailey is talking to reporters: "Please do not leave this room thinking that the Bank of England is edging towards a hike, because frankly, there's nothing in what I said, and I think any of us have said along those lines." The man built a fence around one specific takeaway. The headline hopped it before he'd finished the sentence. * To be fair, Bailey also said this: "If the conflict in the Middle East persists for an extended period... it's likely that we will have to tighten policy." Both quotes are real, both in the story. One is a conditional hanging off an 'if' the size of the Strait of Hormuz. The other is the governor explicitly asking the room not to write the hike story. Guess which one became the headline verb, and which one went to live in paragraph eight. * The Guardian covered the identical decision as: "Bank of England holds interest rates at 3.75% as inflation fears mount." No war in the headline. The scary thing is 'inflation fears,' which 'mount,' as fears contractually must in business journalism. Drier? Sure. But a hold plus a plea for calm is a dry story, and the Guardian let it be one. * Here's why the wording isn't cosmetic: rate expectations are self-fulfilling machinery. Markets price the hike, lenders reprice the mortgages, and the expectation does the damage before any committee votes. Managing that expectation is literally what Bailey was doing at the podium — which makes 'ready to raise' not a summary of the event but a counter-move against it. And the genuinely hawkish fact was sitting right there: three of the nine committee members voted for a hike this time, up from two. That's a better headline than the war. It just has no explosions in it. * Two outlets reported a central bank doing nothing. One reported nothing, plainly. The other reported nothing — but with a war attached and the governor's 'please don't' filed under miscellaneous.