Three rights groups published investigations on Thursday into the killing of Amal Khalil, a 42-year-old reporter for the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar, in an Israeli strike in south Lebanon on April 22. Four major newsrooms wrote it up. They agreed on every fact and on none of the wording. * France 24: "Lebanese journalist deliberately targeted by Israeli attack, probe reveals." That headline manages the bravest thing on the list and the loosest thing on the list inside the same eight words. Bravest: she is the subject of the sentence, and "deliberately" sits where nobody can skip it. Loosest: "probe reveals" is the grammar of settled fact, and the probe was more careful than that. * Here is the source text everyone was working from. Human Rights Watch found the strikes "included apparently deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, which would make them war crimes." Apparently. Would make. Amnesty called it a "direct attack on civilians which should be investigated as a war crime" — a demand for an inquiry, not a verdict. The Lebanese group The Legal Agenda was the blunt one: the military's actions "constitute war crimes and grave violations of international humanitarian law." * So the three investigators landed on three different confidence levels, which means every newsroom could pick one and still be quoting accurately. That is the thing worth understanding here. These headlines are not lies, and they are not courage. They are decisions about whose sentence you are willing to stand behind. * The BBC stood behind HRW's: "Rights groups say Israeli attack that killed Lebanese journalist an apparent war crime." Apparent — HRW's own qualifier, carried through unbroken. It reads timid. It is, technically, the most faithful headline of the four. The Guardian took the flatter route: "Israeli strike that killed journalist in Lebanon was war crime, say rights groups" — was, with the attribution parked at the end where the eye lands last. Al Jazeera used the softest verb of the lot: "Rights groups call Israel's killing of journalist Amal Khalil a 'war crime.'" Call, plus quote marks. * What no headline carried is the material that makes this a story about how a person died rather than a legal category. HRW says Israeli quadcopters appear to have tracked the two women as they sheltered; that the building was struck anyway, after a Lebanese Red Cross appeal relayed through UNIFIL to evacuate them; and that a stun grenade drove Red Cross personnel back before they could reach Khalil where she lay wounded. Israel says it does not intentionally target journalists, and described the occupants of an earlier-struck vehicle as Hezbollah operatives. * Then there is the absence, which is easy to miss because absences are. Of the four headlines, exactly one contains the words Amal Khalil, and it belongs to Al Jazeera. In the other three she is "a Lebanese journalist," "a journalist," "a journalist in Lebanon." All accurate. The problem is that journalist is a category and Amal Khalil was a person with a name and a byline. Her colleague Zainab Faraj, 21, critically wounded in the same attack, appears in none of the four. * The strongest available headline was sitting there for everyone: her name, the verb, and a clear statement of whose finding you are repeating. France 24 got two of the three and rounded a hedge up to certainty on the way. On a story about journalists being killed, that is still closer than most of the industry managed.