Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned Monday evening, and by Tuesday morning every headline had settled on the same piece of furniture to hide the story behind. NPR: "Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigns after clashes with Defense Secretary Hegseth." Bloomberg: "Army Secretary Driscoll to Resign After Clashes With Hegseth." Clashes. Keep that word in your hand while we look at what the stories underneath it actually say. * Because NPR's own reporting — solid as ever, this is a newsroom whose floor we keep complimenting while filing complaints about the sign over the door — lays out a ledger that runs in exactly one direction. Hegseth dismissed Gen. Randy George, the Army's chief of staff, in April, without a stated reason. Hegseth, per NPR, "blocked promotions of Black and female Army officers who had the support of Driscoll." And then the number that should have been every headline: when Hegseth took office, the Army had ten four-star generals on active duty. Today it has five. Ten to five. That's not a personality conflict, that's a personnel event with a body count of careers. * Now ask what "clashes" does to that ledger. A clash implies two people swinging. Symmetry is built into the word — it's the same tool headlines reach for when they can't or won't say who hit whom. We watched this exact word evaporate overnight last week when masked settlers beat an NBC crew and "clashes" suddenly wasn't good enough for NBC anymore. It's back on duty here, doing what it does best: taking one man's documented use of an org chart — firing this general, blocking those promotions — and splitting the agency of it fifty-fifty with the man who finally quit over it. Driscoll didn't clash. Driscoll lost, repeatedly, and left. * But if you want to see a headline really earn its pension, go to Fox: "Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submits resignation to Trump." Read it twice. No Hegseth. No clashes, even. No cause of any kind — a man simply files a document with the president, the way you'd return a library book. This is the same newsroom that, one day earlier, was styling Hegseth "the Secretary of War," a title Congress has never voted to give him. Monday: a grander title than the law provides. Tuesday: total absence from a story that exists because of him. At Fox, Hegseth's name appears when it flatters and dematerializes when it doesn't. That's not a headline desk; that's a press office. * The White House, for its part, sent Driscoll off with a statement calling him "highly effective in advancing President Trump's agenda to Make America Strong Again" — which every outlet dutifully printed, and which answers no question any reader has, starting with: if he was highly effective, why is he gone? * Credit where due, and it's real: NPR's body copy has the goods. The ten-to-five number is in there. The blocked promotions are in there, plainly worded. Driscoll's own April testimony about the fired Gen. George is in there — "We walked right in, and we all gave him a hug... no person that has more respect for Gen. George and his 42 years of service" — the sound of a man defending his general to a committee while his boss walks the same general out the door. The reporting sees everything. The headline then files it all under the same word you'd use for two shopping carts meeting in an aisle. * Here's the tell to carry forward, because this Pentagon will generate more mornings like this one: when the verb in the headline is symmetrical — clashes, tensions, friction, at odds — check the nouns in the body for direction. Who fired, who blocked, who's down to half their generals, who quit. If the body only swings one way, the headline's neutrality isn't caution. It's a favor — and it wasn't done for you.