Andy Burnham walks into Downing Street on Monday, and his first big pledge is already out: the digital ID scheme is dead. Fine. Normal. New governments kill their predecessors' furniture all the time. * Here's the BBC headline on it: "Burnham to scrap digital ID to focus on cost of living in first major policy pledge." Read the middle bit again. To focus on cost of living. That's not a report of what's happening — that's a report of why, and the why is doing a lot of unpaid PR work. * Because where does "cost of living" come from? Burnham's own spokesperson, quoted in the article: the money "will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living." The purpose in the BBC's headline is the incoming government's press line, served without quotation marks — as if the BBC had independently confirmed what's in Andy Burnham's heart. * And here's the lovely part: the BBC's own browser tab knows better. The page title reads "to focus on 'helping with cost of living'" — quote marks intact, whose-words-these-are duly flagged. Somewhere between the browser tab and the headline, the punctuation fell off and the press office's sentence became the BBC's. * The same BBC article offers plenty of rawer material. Nearly three million people signed a petition against the scheme. The Home Affairs Committee chair called its launch "nothing short of a fiasco." The OBR priced it at £1.8 billion. So "Burnham scraps deeply unpopular scheme" was sitting right there — and the Conservatives went further, accusing him of "trying to pretend he's riding to the rescue." The headline picked none of that. It picked the version his own office would have written. * The Guardian handled the identical story like this: "Burnham to scrap Starmer's digital ID scheme in 'reset of priorities.'" Two verifiable facts, one attributed phrase, quote marks doing their small honest job — and Starmer named as the guy whose flagship just got towed. * Every new PM gets a honeymoon. That's fine. The press office exists to write the flattering version. The headline desk exists to not run it.