This morning we dinged the BBC for keeping the word "Russian" one line below its headline on the Myla depot strike — 37 dead "after strike," striker named in sentence one. In fairness to the BBC, we should show you what that technique looks like when it's not a stylistic tic but the entire editorial mission. Here is RT — Russia Today, owned by the Russian state — covering the same 37 deaths, in two headlines. * Headline one, as the fire was still burning: "WATCH huge blasts rock 'missile warehouse' near Kiev." Take the tour. The verb belongs to the blasts, which apparently rock things on their own initiative. The warehouse gets scare quotes, as if its existence were a rumor. And the strike has no author at all — which is genuinely awkward, because Russia's own Defence Ministry proudly claimed this one, telling the world it had targeted a depot in the Kyiv region. RT's headline is shyer about the Russian strike than the Russian military is. * Headline two, once the death toll reached the point where it could no longer be decorative: "Zelensky passes buck over civilian deaths after drone depot blast." Now read it the way a scrolling reader does. People died "after a blast" — there's the BBC's beloved 'after' again, except here it's not a house style, it's a load-bearing wall. The drone in "drone depot" is Ukraine's, not the one that attacked. And the only human being in the entire sentence is Zelensky, whose verb is "passes buck." Thirty-seven people are dead, and in RT's grammar their deaths exist primarily as something Zelensky is being shifty about. * Here's the part where we stay honest, because we said it this morning and we're not un-saying it tonight: the negligence story is real. Zelensky himself called it "terrible negligence on the part of those who stored explosives right next to people," and Kyiv opened criminal cases against its own officials. A serious outlet should absolutely report that. But notice what actually happened: the president publicly named a failure on his own side and launched prosecutions over it. Whatever you think of Zelensky, that is not what passing the buck looks like — that's what picking the buck up looks like. RT took the one moment of self-accountability in this story and headlined it as evasion, while its other headline evaded the small matter of who fired the drones. * And this isn't a one-off reflex. When Russia's campaign against Ukrainian ports was the story, RT covered it with the headline "Ports in a storm: How Kiev's warehouse warfare cost Ukraine its coastline" — a pun, a chuckle, and a construction where Ukraine's own "warehouse warfare" is what cost Ukraine its coastline. When Russian weapons land on Ukrainian ground, RT's headlines go passive, punny or interrogative; the agency always migrates to the people underneath the explosion. Meanwhile Reuters proved, in eleven words, that both facts fit in one line: "Russian Strike on Kyiv-Area Ammunition Depot Triggers Blast, Killing 37." Strike, striker, mechanism, toll. It can be done. It just can't be done from inside the building that answers to the government that fired. * Which is the real point tonight. Every other outlet we graded on this story was making word choices. RT is the rare case where the media critique folds into a disclosure statement: the outlet's owner is the belligerent in the story. When the BBC buries "Russian" in the subhead, that's a bad habit. When RT does it, it's the job.