Tuesday evening, Gulf of Oman: a US Navy MH-60 helicopter put two Hellfire missiles into the engine room of the Vela Nova, a Panama-flagged cargo ship that CENTCOM says was steaming for an Iranian port through the American blockade. That's your one sentence of what happened. Everything else today is about four newsrooms staring at the same fireball and deciding where — or whether — to hide the word "says." * Fox went first and went cleanest: "US Navy opens fire on ship trying to break Iran blockade." No "says" anywhere in the sentence. The ship wasn't accused of breaking the blockade, suspected of it, or alleged to be doing it — it was simply "trying to break" it, the way water is wet. In Fox's grammar, a CENTCOM press release isn't a claim. It's the weather report. * The BBC put a "says" in — "US says it fired missiles to disable ship breaking Iran blockade" — but look at where they parked it. The thing the BBC hedges is the firing. The missiles. The part with a smoke trail, an official statement, and a ship that has visibly stopped working. Meanwhile "ship breaking Iran blockade" — the accusation, the one part of this story that rests entirely on the Pentagon's word — sits there naked, no attribution, stated as fact. That's the hedge installed backwards. You attribute the accusation, not the explosion. * AP wrote the most lawyerly version: "US military says it has fired on a ship in Gulf of Oman to enforce its blockade of Iranian ports." Notice the ship isn't characterized at all — no "trying," no "breaking," the vessel gets to be just a ship. And down in the body the wire kept its receipts: US forces fired on a ship "they said was trying to break" the blockade. Consistent attribution, front to back. Points for that. A small deduction for "to enforce," which makes two Hellfire missiles sound like a parking ticket being tucked under a wiper. * And then Al Jazeera ran the whole arrangement in reverse: "US military fires on cargo vessel it said sought to break Iran blockade." The firing is plain indicative fact — "fires on" — and the justification is the quoted part: "it said sought to break." By the body text AJ is flatly calling it "the attack." Same event Fox filed as routine enforcement, Al Jazeera filed as an attack that comes with an excuse attached. * One phrase, though, made it into everybody's copy: CENTCOM's line that the strike "disabled the steering gear." Every outlet ran it; the BBC even put "the steering gear" in polite little quotes. It's a masterpiece of Pentagon product language — two air-to-surface missiles into the engine room of a ship with a civilian crew aboard, described the way a mechanic describes adjusting your brakes. Al Jazeera was the one outlet that thought to note CENTCOM "did not say if any crew members were wounded." A question none of the four headlines found room for. * We've been watching this shell game all week. Monday it was Bloomberg quietly dropping "Iran says" off a headline; Saturday it was five outlets selling a Hormuz "deal" that opened nothing. The lesson keeps being the same one: attribution isn't a grammar tic, it's the outlet telling you whose version of reality gets to be the default setting. When the ship is "trying to break" the blockade, the ship is guilty. When the US "says" it fired, a missile becomes a statement. Read where the "says" is before you read anything else.