What Breaks When Facts Become Stories? The Distortions Source-Agreement Metrics Miss When Models Retell Real Events

Language models are now widely used to turn recorded facts into media for public consumption, yet evaluation of such output still assumes agreement with the source as its measure of success. In reconstruction, where departing from the source can itself be the goal, this criterion measures the wrong construct: applied as is, it counts intended departures as errors; withheld, it lets real distortion through. We had three model families rewrite 2,000 news articles as summaries and as stories, measured what changed on every axis of the five Ws and how, and asked of each detected distortion whether the assigned perspective warranted it, which set a third of them aside. Time and manner were not lost but replaced, while place and causation lost the expressions that carry them. Accountability distortion behaved otherwise. Barely present in summaries, it rose up to sevenfold in stories, and of those whose direction could be determined, two in three lightened the perpetrator's responsibility. Such distortions survive claim-level fact checking and leave the retelling grammatically cleaner than its source. Where our judges disagreed, three authors relabeling the same cases converged on whether a distortion had occurred but not on whether it was warranted, a boundary contested rather than merely hard to detect. To support work on detecting and reducing them, we release ReTold-2k, a reconstructable corpus with the scoring protocol and per-judge baselines kept unaggregated.