On Saturday, US Central Command said two Navy ships evaded Iranian ballistic missiles, and that American forces answered by disabling two Iranian oil tankers and destroying a third. One sentence of background, done. Here's NBC's headline: "U.S. strikes 3 Iranian oil tankers after Iran targets Navy warships, military says." * Read the middle of that sentence at reading speed. "After Iran targets Navy warships" — present tense, fact voice, cause established. Then, at the very end, wearing a lanyard: "military says." By the time the chaperone shows up, the claim has already walked itself home. And one floor down, NBC's subheadline loses the chaperone entirely: no American personnel were harmed "in the Iranian missile attacks." The. Not "alleged," not "reported" — the attacks, definite article, notarized. * This is not the only way to write it. AP: "US military hits 3 Iranian oil tankers after saying Navy ships were targeted with missiles." NPR: "after saying Navy warships were targeted." The Washington Post: "after saying warships were targeted with ballistic missiles." Same facts, same deadline — but the "saying" sits inside the causal clause, where it can actually do its job. Which matters here more than usual, because the missiles were evaded. Nothing was hit. No wreckage, no casualties, no second source. Every fact in the justification chain comes from exactly one narrator, and the narrator wears a uniform. * Now the receipts, from NBC's own week. On Thursday we wrote about this exact newsroom's headline on the Kuhestak wedding strike: "Iran says U.S. strike on wedding party killed at least 4 and injured dozens." There, the attribution led the parade — subject Iran, verb says, the dead waiting behind the colon of doubt. Forty-eight hours later, the claimant changed nationality, and the attribution moved to the back row. That's the experiment run clean, one outlet, one war, one week: whose claim it is decides where the "says" sits. * Let's be fair about the size of this. Iranian officials didn't deny launching the missiles — Tehran's response was to call the tanker strikes "illegal and aggressive," which is not the statement of a country claiming it fired nothing. CENTCOM's account may well hold up, and NBC did put an attribution tag in the headline, which clears a bar some homepages tripped over. Our point is narrower, and it's about furniture: a hedge only hedges where it stands. "Iran says X happened" reads as doubt. "X happened, military says" reads as a photo credit. * The fix costs nothing. Pick a placement rule — attribution up front, attribution in the clause, we're flexible — and apply it to both militaries. Because right now the style guide has a passport, and readers can tell.