On Saturday, in the West Bank village of Jalud, an NBC News crew was interviewing Aida Ahmed Abdullah, 51, about being driven from her home by settlers — when a gray car with Israeli plates reversed up the hill, and at least four masked men got out and went to work with sticks and rocks. Correspondent Matt Bradley: “They smashed our car windshield, hit our crew with clubs and beat Aida unconscious.” This piece is not about the attack. It's about what happened to headlines afterwards. * NBC's own: “Palestinian woman and NBC News team attacked by masked Israeli settlers in West Bank.” Al Jazeera: “Israeli settlers attack international news team.” And Fox News, Monday morning: “Masked Israeli settlers attack NBC News crew and Palestinian family in West Bank.” Subject, verb, object. Attacker named, in the active voice, before the comma. Everywhere. * Now rewind one day. On Sunday we published a piece about how the AP — covering masked settlers descending on Palestinian villages that same weekend — filed the word “clashes,” a verb that needs two willing participants, for events where one side had the sticks. Trump's own ambassador had gone with “terrorists.” The wire settled on weather. * So the industry has now run the experiment for us, with a 24-hour turnaround. Same region. Same perpetrators — masked men, Israeli plates, sticks. Same kind of victim, even: a Palestinian woman who'd already lost her home. The only variable that changed is that three of the people being beaten this time carried press credentials from 30 Rockefeller Plaza. And suddenly every newsroom in the business remembered how transitive verbs work. * Credit where due, and it lands somewhere unexpected: Fox — an outlet we've spent much of this summer grading for finding softer nouns — ran the plainest headline of the lot, put “masked Israeli settlers” in the driver's seat of the sentence, and carried Bradley's “beat Aida unconscious” quote high. Yes, a story about a rival network getting attacked is an easy story for Fox to tell straight. It still told it straight. * One more verb worth watching came from the top: Netanyahu's office called the attackers a “handful of rioters” whose actions “harm Israel's standing in the world.” Note what gets harmed in that sentence. Not Aida Abdullah, who was hospitalized. Not the cameraman or the producer. The standing. * Aida Ahmed Abdullah has been describing exactly this — masked men, her family, her home — for a long time, to anyone with a notebook. It took her being beaten next to a TV crew for the description to make it into a headline unlaundered. The villagers of Jalud don't get to bring NBC everywhere. The verbs shouldn't require it.