Since Sunday, Israeli settlers have blockaded homes in the West Bank village of Qusra — water cut, electricity cut, entrances blocked. Two newsrooms looked at the same village this morning and performed two different censuses. Al Jazeera's headline: "Israeli settlers' siege of Palestinian homes in West Bank enters fourth day," subhead: "Dozens of settlers besiege three Palestinian families." The AP wire that ran across American outlets, NPR included: the ambassador "condemned the actions of Jewish settlers who are besieging the home of an American Palestinian family." Three families in one version. One family — the one with a US passport — in the other, with the neighbors compressed into "at least one other that has been targeted." * Look at the timing too. The siege is five days old. The American wire story is as old as a tweet. What moved it wasn't the blockade, the stones, or the family drinking leftover winter well water — it was Ambassador Mike Huckabee posting that "actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting." A US official spoke; therefore, news. The people under siege had been speaking for five days. * Here's what Al Jazeera did with those five days, and it deserves saying plainly: they got the people inside the houses on the phone. Aisha Abu Rida, besieged, on the record. Loai Ridi in Toledo, describing his brother rationing "supplies for two to three days left." And they sent a correspondent, Nida Ibrahim, who reported a detail no one else had because you have to physically drive there to learn it: "Every single entrance to Qusra is blocked by the Israeli army... not only are we talking about three families trapped in their homes, but we are also talking about a whole village." That's the difference between covering a siege and covering a statement about one. * Now the caveats, because we don't do sycophancy. Within hours of Huckabee's post, Al Jazeera also ran a second piece headlined "US diplomat calls Israeli settler siege of West Bank homes 'act of terror'" — even the newsroom that didn't need the ambassador knows an American official is the bigger search term. The gravitational pull of the US tweet bends everyone's front page. And Al Jazeera is owned by the Government of Qatar, which has its own reasons to like this story; the reporting above stands on its named sources, which is why we can use it. * About that word. "Terror" finally showed up in Western headlines this week — in quotation marks, attributed, handled with tongs. The quote marks are technically correct; it is a quote. But notice the mechanism: after five days of stones and cut water lines, the word entered the wire's vocabulary only when a US official donated it. The strongest language in any of these stories — "the Israeli terrorists doing this" — belongs to Huckabee, a man who has spent years championing the settlement movement. When the ambassador is out-wording your newsroom, the style guide isn't neutral. It's just waiting for permission. * The two families without an American in the house spent this morning in the same village, behind the same stones, drinking the same well water. If they want a wire story of their own, the lesson of Thursday is clear: find an ambassador.