NPR published a genuinely important piece of journalism this weekend: as soon as Monday, an estimated 26,000 children who crossed the border alone will be standing in immigration court without lawyers. Some of them, NPR notes, are "too young to have learned how to talk at all." * Here's the headline NPR put on it: "More than 25,000 children lose previous legal protections, as federal contract ends." * Read that again. The children "lose" their protections — the way you lose mittens. The contract "ends" — the way summer ends. It's a headline where a thing simply happened, on its own, to 25,000 people with no adults involved. Even the comma is doing cover work: "as federal contract ends" files a government decision under weather. * The article itself knows exactly who did what. It reports that the Trump administration's Office of Refugee Resettlement stopped paying the children's legal providers in November — they're owed some $65 million — after lawyers refused to hand over confidential information about their child clients. The nonprofit running the program says it straight: "The government is withholding payment for work that has already been performed in order to extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to." * That's not a contract "ending." That's a contract being ended, by named people, for a stated reason, over the objection of lawyers citing attorney-client privilege. NPR's reporters nailed all of it. Then the headline sanded every actor off. * The best detail: the story's own web address ends with the words "children-lawyers-trump-administration." The URL made it past the headline desk. The headline didn't. * Why it matters, in the article's own numbers: "without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the United States less than 1% of the time," one attorney told NPR. "I worry some will be killed if they lose their lawyers." A headline that hides the hand on the switch isn't neutral. It's just wrong in a politer font.