On Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on CNBC to sell the Iran war as a bargain: "there haven't been American deaths. It's really just an economic choke-out." Eighteen US service members have died in it. On Thursday he posted a correction: "I misspoke… I was thinking about the Venezuelan military operation where no service members died." That's the event. Now the headlines. * Bloomberg: "Commerce Secretary Lutnick Says He Misspoke on US Military Deaths." Fox's live blog: "Lutnick says he 'misspoke' about US military deaths in Iran war." Look at who's holding the pen. "Misspoke" is Lutnick's word, from Lutnick's post, describing Lutnick's error in the gentlest term English has for saying something false on television. Fox at least put quote marks around it. Bloomberg didn't quote it — it adopted it. The event, as Bloomberg tells it, is a man clarifying. Not a man who'd said eighteen dead people didn't exist. * Now the other two newsrooms on our list that ran the story. Reuters: "Lutnick apologizes for saying no Americans have died in Iran war." CNN: "Lutnick apologizes for asserting that there 'haven't been American deaths' from the Iran war." Same facts, different grammar. Those headlines tell you what he said wrong. Bloomberg's tells you what he said afterwards about what he said. One is the news. The other is the press office's summary of the news. * "Misspoke" also smuggles in a theory: a slip, the wrong file grabbed. Reuters tested the theory in one sentence — the CNBC interview was one "in which Venezuela did not come up." He was asked about Iran, answered about Iran, and offered "no American deaths" as the reason the Iran strategy would be "very effective." That's not a mispronunciation. It's a sales pitch with a hole where the casualties go. * And the number. Eighteen is in the Reuters lede, in CNN's second paragraph, in Trump's own post — "18 people were killed in Iran!" — and in none of the headlines we read. The dead made it into every newsroom's story and into nobody's headline. In July we wrote about NPR printing the names, ranks and hometowns of two soldiers killed at a base in Jordan. Two months later the same casualties have been compressed to a round number, then to "deaths," then to a verb about the man who forgot them. * There's context Bloomberg's verb can't hold, either. CNN notes four deaths that quietly disappeared from the Defense Department's website totals in July, and a defense secretary who has criticized the press for covering service members' deaths at all. A cabinet member saying "no deaths" isn't a random slip in that environment. It is the environment. * Bloomberg has form here. Last month its headline on a Trump post travelled from "Lashes Out" to "Makes Sweeping New Demands" in three edits, each one calmer. At Jackson Hole it put a rate-hike warning in the Fed chair's mouth that he never gave. The house style seems to be: take what the powerful man says about himself and print it as the description of what happened. Thursday the powerful man said "misspoke." So that's what happened. * To be fair: "says he misspoke" is a true sentence, and Bloomberg writes for traders who want the correction fast and the emotion never. But eighteen families read headlines too. The one that said "apologizes for saying no Americans have died" told them what happened. The one that said "misspoke" told them what he'd prefer they think happened.