On October 17, ICE agents detained Ricardo Gonzalez, 40, in North Long Beach; he went to a hospital. His family and witnesses say agents hit him with a vehicle, tased him and broke his arm. CNN wrote ‘injured during’. Read CNN’s headline as a sentence and look for the subject. Ricardo Gonzalez, 40, is ‘injured during’ an ‘incident’, and nothing in the sentence injures him. That is the act with no actor: the grammar keeps the broken arm and drops whoever broke it. His daughter says federal agents struck his e-bike with an unmarked vehicle near Elm Avenue and 56th Street and tased him twice. The Long Beach Post, over the same Saturday, writes ‘ICE agents break his arm, witnesses say’. CNN’s own page says more lower down. Its fourth paragraph reports Long Beach police found ‘a man handcuffed and bleeding while being detained by ICE’; the fifth describes video of an agent in a ‘Police ICE’ vest holding him down as he yells that his arm is broken. ‘Officials say’ sits over all of it, yet no DHS or ICE official in any of the coverage gives an account of how he was hurt. DHS had not answered CNN, ABC7 or the Long Beach Watchdog. The frame picks the feeling: the same Saturday told as an ‘incident’ asks for regret, and told as ‘ICE agents break his arm’ asks for anger. The tell to carry into the next headline is a wound with no hand: when someone is hurt and the sentence has no one doing it, ask whom the plain version would name. KTLA’s ‘suffers broken arm during violent ICE arrest’ drops the doer too. Why agents stopped him remains unclear, KTLA says. The video shows who held him down.
