Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House podium at the end of the month, and Wednesday every newsroom she spent nineteen months jousting with wrote her send-off. Here's the test we ran on those send-offs: does the story mention what she actually did to the people writing it? NBC's — "White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to step down" — does not. The body is Trump's Truth Social post ("spend more time with her beautiful young children and family"), her own X statement ("the honor and adventure of a lifetime"), a biography, and one genuinely useful pattern note: she's the fifth senior woman to leave the administration this year. Two social-media statements with a byline on top. * What's missing isn't gossip. It's the record. Leavitt's operation took control of the press pool — the rotation that had been run for generations by the independent correspondents' association — and started deciding which reporters got into events and onto Air Force One. That's not our characterization; it's CNN's, from their own Leavitt analysis this same day: her operation "took over control of the pool system long administered by the independent correspondents' association." It's also the single most consequential thing any press secretary has done to the press in decades, and it's absent from an exit story written by the press. * The timing makes the omission louder. This announcement landed — as CNN put it, "somehow fitting" — "in the middle of a storm over whether the White House used reporters on Air Force One as a decoy" during the president's secret plane switch in Turkey. That's this week's storm. Monday the press corps learned it may have flown as unwitting bait; Wednesday the person who runs the press operation resigned; and NBC's story about the resignation connects those dots with a grand total of zero sentences. * The comparison set, quickly. Fox: "Trump says Karoline Leavitt will leave White House press secretary role, become outside advisor" — the grammar gives Trump the announcement, the verb, and the future; she's cargo. NPR went minimalist to the point of anonymity — the headline is literally "White House press secretary leaving," four words, no name — but its body at least states the plain fact most versions tiptoed around: "At the podium, Leavitt was often confrontational with the press corps." The Guardian attached a scoreboard: "Leavitt departs White House press secretary role with Trump's ratings at historic low." * And CNN — credit and eyebrow in the same breath. Their analysis is the only piece that files the actual indictment: her tenure was "devastating to the quaint notion that the press has a vital role in holding presidents to account." The eyebrow is the headline it ran under: "Why Karoline Leavitt might be impossible for Trump to replace." The most damning assessment of the week, packaged as a performance review. She dismantled the accountability system — five stars, very hard to replace. * "Spend more time with family" is the oldest exit line in Washington, and in this case it may even be true — she had her second child in May, and nobody should smirk at that. The problem isn't printing her reason. It's printing only her reason, and his praise, and calling it coverage. When the subject of the story spent her tenure deciding which of you got seats on the plane, the story owes readers one paragraph about the seats. * The press pool exists so that somebody is always in the room (we wrote a whole explainer on it — it's the dozen reporters who speak for a thousand). This week the room wrote up the person who took the pool's keys, and most versions forgot to mention the keys. That's not politeness. That's the habit she counted on.