One sentence of background: a North Carolina grand jury on Monday indicted a 17-year-old on three counts of first-degree murder for allegedly helping plan the May attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego — agreeing in advance, prosecutors say, to livestream it and publish the gunmen's manifesto — an attack that killed three worshippers. Now read the headlines, because they all made the same choice. * CNN: "North Carolina teen charged in deadly San Diego mosque shooting." NBC: "Teen girl who recorded San Diego mosque shooting livestream is charged with murder." The New York Times: "Teen Charged With Murder After Livestreaming San Diego Mosque Shooting." Al Jazeera: "Teen faces life over livestream of San Diego mosque attack." Every one of them accurate. Every one of them missing the same word. * Here is what the indictment and CNN's own reporting describe: an alleged plan, agreed before the attack, to kill people at a mosque, broadcast it live, and release a manifesto "purporting to justify the attack." A Sonnenrad patch — a neo-Nazi symbol — allegedly bought and mailed to one gunman, "which Vazquez did in fact wear" during the killing. Hate speech scrawled on a weapon. A suicide note about "racial pride." And prosecutors say that after the mosque, the shooters planned to attack a Jewish temple and a predominantly African American school next. A three-target ideological campaign against three different minorities. The English language has a standard word for killing worshippers to publicize an ideology. * We know the word still works, because these same newsrooms used it fluently nineteen months ago. New Year's Day 2025, Bourbon Street: the FBI announced the attacker was "100% inspired by ISIS" and called it "an act of terrorism," and the word was in headlines before the casualty count settled — NBC's live blog was literally titled "Investigation into terror driver's background." Nobody waited for a charging document. The word followed the flag found in the truck. * In San Diego, the officials talked differently — the suspects "exchanged radicalized ideology," said police; "the entire weight of the federal, state, and local government" is coming, said the FBI's man in North Carolina — everything except the T-word. And the headlines dutifully declined to supply it. That's the actual finding here, and it's why we're not singling anyone out: this isn't one newsroom's word choice, it's an industry protocol. The press has outsourced the word "terrorism" to the government, and the government spends it asymmetrically. When the FBI says it, it leads by noon. When the FBI doesn't, three men dead at prayer files under crime news. * The paragraph that should sit with you is deep in CNN's story, and credit to CNN for reporting it: before the attack, the Islamic Center had already put up a fence, installed bulletproof windows, and run active-shooter drills at its school. A congregation was drilling its children for this day. Amin Abdullah, the security guard, died engaging the gunmen; Nadir Awad and Mansour Kaziha died drawing the attack away toward the parking lot. Whatever the charging documents call it, the people inside that building had been living with terrorism as a line item in the budget. * We are not asking for looser language — 'alleged' belongs on every claim about a 17-year-old defendant, and her lawyer says she is innocent. We're asking headline desks to own their vocabulary instead of leasing it from officialdom. If 'terror' goes in the headline when the flag is ISIS's, it goes in the headline when the patch is a Sonnenrad. Otherwise the word isn't describing events. It's endorsing someone else's sorting of them.