Saturday night, a bomb went off at the entrance of Balzi Rossi, an upscale restaurant in central Moscow — a kilogram of TNT packed with ball bearings, three people dead, 21 injured. That's the event. The coverage is where the war continues by other means. * RT's headline arrived fast and fully labeled: 'Moscow restaurant bombing is "the very definition of terrorism" – ex-Pentagon analyst.' Read the sourcing on that again. RT didn't call it terrorism in its own voice — it found a retired American defense official to say it, because the word hits harder with a Pentagon accent. State media laundering its adjectives through a guest, like a landlord getting a friend to tell you the rent is going up. * Now rewind two days. When nine people were killed in Kyiv on Thursday, RT's headline famously couldn't locate a shooter — we covered it here: pure passive voice, deaths that just occurred, weather-style. In Moscow, RT identified the genre, the moral category and the implied villain within hours, before investigators had even named the woman at the door. Active voice, it turns out, is geographic. * CNN went the other way. Its headline: 'Bomb explodes at Moscow restaurant, killing two victims and woman suspected of delivering device.' Clunky? Extremely. But that clunk is doing honest work — it splits the dead into the two people it can classify and the one it can't yet. That's a copy desk refusing to finish a police investigation from a keyboard. * And here's why that caution matters. Deep in CNN's own report, via the Russian business daily Kommersant: investigators believe the device was detonated remotely, and the woman — described as a courier carrying what she called a gift — 'most likely did not know what the package contained.' If that holds, she wasn't the bomber. She was the third victim. Every headline that cast her as the attacker told the story exactly backwards. * So, 'the very definition of terrorism'? Possibly. But a definition only means something if you apply it at every set of coordinates. On RT's front page, a bomb in Moscow gets a category and a culprit; nine bodies in Kyiv get a shrug and a passive verb. Meanwhile, the most honest sentence of the night was also the ugliest one — and CNN wrote it.