The week everyone stopped waiting for the referee.

The object, the company and the agency documenting the crater are all American, and the story is told entirely from the outside. South Korea does not mention that its Danuri orbiter photographed the site before and after the collision, Japan does not recall the part played by its Ispace lander in the January 2025 launch the stage came from, and India does not cover the impact despite its own lunar programme. Four countries directly involved, not one national account.

The densest coverage of the file is from the Gulf — ten on-topic articles for one Qatari outlet, nine for a Saudi one — and neither brings together two distinct mastheads, so neither becomes a perspective. The diplomatic sponsors of the process, the United States and the United Kingdom, are all but absent too, and no Lebanese outlet appears in the corpus even though Lebanon is the country most directly affected by the strikes. The file is read everywhere except where it is playing out.

The duties of 10 to 12.5% that came into force on 24 July target some sixty partners and close to 99% of American imports, yet the dispute is told only from the Americas and Europe. Chile and Brazil are the only ones to consider explicitly an alternative trade rapprochement with China and India — an option absent from North American perspectives, and absent too from New Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul and Pretoria, all directly exposed.