One sentence of background: oil jumped more than three percent on Monday as Iran stuck to its price for reopening the Strait of Hormuz — end the military threats, end the sanctions, pay compensation. Al Jazeera's headline: "Oil prices, stocks surge as Hormuz closure drags on." And look at that — "closure" finally made an AJ headline. It just couldn't get in alone. It needed a chaperone, and the chaperone was the stock ticker. * Rewind forty-eight hours. On Saturday, while AP was printing the fine print at full size and we were writing that this deal opens nothing, Al Jazeera's headline read: "Iran deliberates Hormuz arrangement amid uncertain prospects with US." We called it fog thick enough to land a plane in — an "arrangement" being "deliberated" amid "prospects," three nouns deep before anything touched the ground. * Now read Monday's follow-up and try to find the arrangement. You can't. It's not soft-pedaled, not walked back — it is simply not in the article. The whole weekend deal, the thing that moved oil markets and five newsrooms, has been memory-holed from AJ's own coverage inside two days. And the hardest sentence in Monday's piece is once again subcontracted out: "the strait is still essentially closed" arrives in the mouth of SEB bank analysts. Saturday the tough line belonged to an IRGC spokesperson; Monday it belongs to a bank. AJ's own voice sticks to meteorology — "hopes dwindle." Prospects, hopes. Nobody in Doha's headlines ever decides anything; conditions just roll in off the Gulf. * Then there's "drags on." The Strait of Hormuz has been shut since March. Five months. "Drags on" is the phrase for a meeting entering its seventieth minute, not for a fifth month of a closed global chokepoint — the wording lets a brand-new reader assume this is a long weekend, not a season. * For calibration, the same fact wore three different verbs on Monday. The New York Times: "Iran Insists Strait of Hormuz Will Stay Closed Until Trump Agrees to Demands" — "insists," the verb of a toddler refusing shoes, but credit where due: it's also the only headline that tells you what reopening would actually cost. CNN's live file: Iran "signals" the strait will stay closed — "signals," as if Tehran were being coy rather than publishing a price list. And AJ? Iran isn't even in the sentence. The subject is oil prices. The country doing the closing has been demoted to background radiation. * Here's the scoreboard, then. On Saturday we wrote that nothing was opening, because the deal's own text said so. On Monday the market agreed, at $84.64 a barrel. The ships couldn't get Al Jazeera's headline to say "closed" for five months — the Dow managed it in one trading session. When a strait only becomes closed once Brent crude notices, you've learned something about who the headline thinks is waiting in the water.