The facts, such as anyone outside the Pentagon knows them: on Sunday, US Southern Command struck a small vessel in the eastern Pacific and killed two people, announced it Monday in a post on X, and called it the work of 'Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere.' It's the first announced strike since June 21. Nobody has published the two people's names. No evidence about the boat has been shown. That's the entire public record. Now watch each newsroom fill in the blanks. * Fox News: 'US kills two narco-terrorists in strike' — narco-terrorists in quotation marks, which is Fox's way of saying the word is on loan. On loan from whom? From the people who fired the missile. The only identity these two men will ever have in print is the label chosen by the institution that killed them, and Fox put it in the headline slot where a noun for 'two dead people' goes. * Inside, Fox relays the Pentagon's proof: 'Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement in narco-trafficking.' Confirmed — by the same building that fired the shot and wrote the press release. No court, no charge, no name, no cargo manifest. In Fox's copy that sentence just stands there, unaccompanied, doing the work of a verdict. * Here's what else stands out about Fox's article: what's not in it. No mention that at least 221 people have been killed in these strikes since the campaign began last September. No mention of the legal fight over whether any of this is lawful. The single trace of controversy is an all-caps link to another Fox story: 'DEM SENATOR ACCUSES PENTAGON OF MURDER WITH BOAT STRIKES.' The debate exists on Fox's own servers. It just doesn't exist in Fox's article about the strike. * CNN kept its lawyer's vocabulary on: 'US launches deadly strike on alleged drug boat.' There's the careful word — alleged — and look where it landed. On the boat. The vessel gets the presumption of innocence; the two humans aboard don't appear in the headline at all. CNN's body does real work Fox's doesn't — the 221 figure, Senator Tim Kaine saying the strikes 'likely illegally killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking,' and the honest admission that 'it was not clear why the strikes... paused' for two months. But the headline spends its one 'alleged' on fiberglass. * The cleanest handling came from Al Jazeera: 'US military says strike on alleged drug-smuggling boat kills two.' Attribution first, before anything else — the entire story is one side's account, and the headline wears that on its sleeve. * This is why sourcing grammar matters more here than almost anywhere: there is no second source. No survivors quoted, no local officials, no wreckage examined by reporters. Every fact in every version came from the shooter. When that's the supply chain, 'says' isn't pedantry — it's the most important word available. Two people died Sunday with no names, no charges and no trial, and the word 'alleged' was sitting right there. One newsroom spent it on the men's boat. Another skipped it and printed the compound noun the missile came with.