One sentence of background: a car bomb went off Saturday at a toll plaza on the Pan-American Highway in Colombia's southwest, lightly wounding two security guards, one day after Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in — and the army blames two FARC dissident factions. On Sunday, France 24 filed the story under this headline: "Blast wounds two as de la Espriella cracks down on prisons." Read the physics of that sentence. The bomb has no author — it's a "blast," a thing that happens, like weather. The only human agency in the headline belongs to the president, who "cracks down." A guerrilla car bomb and a state response walked in together, and only one of them came out with a verb it chose. * We've seen this word-class trick before — Thetford's break-ins became "disorder," a Dublin firebomb got filed under "incident." "Blast" belongs to the same family: a word that reports the sound instead of the act. And to be fully fair to France 24, there's a defensible version of this caution: the FARC-dissident attribution is the army's allegation, not a court finding, and a headline that declines to convict on the military's say-so is doing something right. But notice where the caution runs out. The same headline has no hesitation stitching the president's prison crackdown into the frame — his response gets top billing as confirmed, muscular fact. Skepticism for the bomb's authorship, none for the government's framing of its own busy weekend. Caution that only flows in one direction isn't caution; it's an editorial posture with a safety excuse. * Meanwhile, day two of the de la Espriella era has turned into a full round of adjective bingo. Al Jazeera's version of the same bomb story — "Car bomb attack rattles Colombia after inauguration of hardline president" — describes the man three different ways in one article: "far-right lawyer," "hardline president," "right-wing leader." AP's wire, carried by The Washington Post, went with "conservative political neophyte." And on Friday, as we covered at the time, Fox introduced him as "Trump ally 'El Tigre'" riding a continental "rightward shift," while Bloomberg christened him an "Outsider." Same man, same weekend: far-right, hardline, conservative, outsider, Trump ally. That's not a spectrum of opinion about him — it's a map of each outlet's audience, printed where his name should be. * The labels matter because they pre-load the next four years of coverage. A "far-right" president's prison crackdown is an alarm bell; a "conservative" one's is a policy; a "Trump ally's" is a promise kept. France 24 solved the problem by picking no label at all — which sounds neutral until you notice that a man with no adjective and a strong verb reads like a man doing his job. The bomb, meanwhile, is universally homeless: not one of these outlets put the army's FARC-dissident attribution in a headline, not even hedged. The only characters allowed to act in this weekend's headlines are governments. * And that's the real tell about how this presidency is going to get covered. On Saturday he answered the bomb by moving 117 prisoners into maximum-security lockups and vowing on social media that there would be no leniency. The next thousand days of this story will be a contest over which noun he is and which verbs he gets. Two days in, the scoreboard reads: verbs, all of them, his — and the people setting off the bombs haven't been the subject of a single sentence.