The same AP story about Hebron ran under five different headlines before breakfast

The AP copy filed at 2:44 a.m. ET on 23 October and updated at 6:46 a.m. appeared on US News as “Israel orders soldiers to close off the West Bank following an attack in the Palestinian territory.” The same story ran on Rochester First under a URL slug preserving an earlier line — “Israel’s military says it killed 2 men who had launched an attack in the occupied West Bank.” News4Jax and WHDH carried “Israel orders West Bank closure after soldiers kill 2 Palestinians accused of carrying out attack.” The Crossville Chronicle ran “after army kills 2 Palestinians it says were behind an attack.” NPR ran “after soldiers kill 2 men behind an alleged attack,” dropping the word Palestinians and shifting the hedge from the attribution to the noun. The Globe and Mail ran “Israel orders West Bank closure after soldiers killed in attack”: the Palestinian deaths vanish and the only verb is passive.

Network headlines diverged by a different mechanism. NBC’s current line — “Israel orders sweeping West Bank operation after military says 2 soldiers were killed in attack that left 2 gunmen dead” — attributes the Israeli deaths to the Israeli military while stating the gunmen’s deaths as unattributed fact, applying the hedge in the opposite direction from AP’s. NBC’s page still carries its earlier formulation, “Israel orders full West Bank ‘lockdown' after deadly shooting attack,” in the URL slug, and logs the revision openly: published 4:47 a.m. EDT, updated 6:51 p.m. CNN went to the physical evidence instead: “Israel begins demolitions in West Bank city after two soldiers killed in shooting attack.” The Washington Post’s entry, filed at 7:43 p.m. EDT, is the AP Mideast roundup carried under /business/ — wire, not Post staff framing.

Assessment: Headline variance of this width on one wire feed is usually production, not politics: desks cut to column width, re-top on update, and inherit slugs they never revisit. That is the charitable and probably correct reading of most of the five. It is not a defence of the Globe and Mail line, where the choice to make “soldiers killed” the only clause produces a sentence in which a closure order has no object and two dead men have no existence. Note also what this desk could not check: we failed to verify Reuters, BBC, New York Times, FT and Economist copy inside the window, so treat this as a partial sample of the Anglophone field, not a league table.