One missile came through a roof in Kuhestak, a coastal town on the Strait of Hormuz, on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, four newsrooms had filed the people underneath it in four different places: paragraph two, paragraph seventeen, the headline, and nowhere. * The one-sentence version of the event, since you get the news elsewhere: the US bombed IRGC sites across Iran, Iranian officials say one strike hit a house hosting a wedding — at least four dead, including a child, dozens wounded — and Iran fired back at bases in Jordan and Iraq. Those casualty figures come from Iranian officials and state media, and no outlet has independently verified them. Hold that thought; it's about to do a lot of work. * Reuters went with 'US pounds Iran, Tehran strikes back at bases in biggest exchange since July.' Muscular verbs, both directions, and — credit where due — the wedding lands in paragraph two: 'Iran accused Washington of hitting a wedding party, killing four people and wounding dozens.' The wire also printed CENTCOM's response in full: 'The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.' Read that quote twice. The first half is a denial. The second half is a press release that hitched a ride on the denial, and it ran unchallenged. * NPR's headline: 'Iran fires on its Gulf neighbors, retaliating for U.S. strikes after a monthlong lull.' Look at the grammar. Iran is the shooter. The neighbors are the victims. The US strikes — the ones that, per Iranian media, put a hole through a wedding — are a subordinate clause you drive past on the way to the verb. The wedding itself shows up at paragraph seventeen, behind a polite section header, wearing its 'according to Iranian media' badge. Yesterday we graded NPR's attribution verbs; today it's attribution geography. Paragraph seventeen is where a headline goes to retire. * Al Jazeera did something genuinely interesting: it disagreed with itself. The news desk's headline was careful — 'Iran says US bombed a wedding party in Sirik, killing at least four people.' Iran says. Fine, that's the honest hedge, and even Al Jazeera kept it on. Then the explainer desk published 'What do we know about the fatal US bombing of a wedding in Iran's Sirik' — and somewhere between the two desks the hedge fell off the truck. Same building, same day: one headline says this is a claim, the other says this is a thing that happened. * And Fox. Fox's live blog headline was 'Iran launches retaliation after US strikes on IRGC targets across Iran' — Iran the aggressor by sentence structure, same trick as NPR. But scroll Fox's world page on Wednesday evening and it gets cleaner than that: five Iran headlines — 'Iran vows to continue striking until Americans 'regret their crimes,'' 'US launches retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets' — and not one word about the wedding, the child, or Kuhestak. In Fox's version of Tuesday night, nobody died at all. Things were struck: 'air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets,' per CENTCOM's shopping list, quoted verbatim. Hardware suffered. People did not come up. * Here's why the spread matters. Every one of these outlets is working from the same two sources: CENTCOM's statement and Iranian state media's casualty reports. The facts available to Reuters at paragraph two were available to NPR at paragraph seventeen and to Fox at paragraph never. What differed wasn't the information. It was the editorial judgment about who Tuesday night happened to — shipping lanes, Gulf airbases, or the people at the party. * When the shooting restarted two days ago, we asked which outlet told you who fired first. Today's question is simpler and worse: who told you somebody died. Hedge the number, absolutely — 'Iran says' is doing honest work in that Al Jazeera headline. But there's a difference between hedging the dead and misplacing them. Paragraph seventeen is a hedge. Nowhere is a verdict.