Andy Burnham capped English bus fares at £2 on Wednesday, and the BBC went out and found the perfect passenger: Sarah, a wool shop owner who spends four hours a day on buses and stands to save £500 a year. “It’s going to make a huge difference to me,” she told them. Lovely piece. We’re genuinely happy for Sarah. * The Guardian went out and found a different set of people: the ones paying for it. Its headline — “Funding bus fare cap from aid budget will hit world’s poorest, Burnham told.” Same policy. Same day. One outlet met the winner; the other met the bill. * Because the £500m cap isn’t conjured from nowhere. Around £400m of it comes from turning the UK’s international climate donations into loans. Money that was promised to poor countries as grants will now arrive as debt. The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, explained the trick to the BBC with genuine cheer: “instead of putting that money out as grants we are going to be issuing loans and so that money comes back in.” Comes back in. Like it was lent to a mate for the taxi home — not pledged to countries drowning under a climate bill they didn’t run up. * To be fair, the BBC’s main article does carry that quote. In roughly paragraph ten. Delivered by the minister, challenged by no one. The only critic the BBC quoted was the shadow chancellor, grumbling that the government hadn’t said where the money would come from — while the answer sat two paragraphs below him, wearing a department acronym as a disguise. * The Guardian just picked up the phone. ActionAid produced the line of the day: the funding plan “throws global south countries under the bus.” The head of the aid umbrella group Bond went with “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Friends of the Earth: “nothing short of a travesty.” None of these people are hard to reach. The BBC has their numbers. * Here’s the thing about a fare cap: it has two ends. There’s the person who stops paying, and there’s whoever starts. The BBC covered the first end in loving, vox-popped detail — Sarah in Warwickshire, Charlie in Bristol, weekend trips into town. The other end of this one is several thousand miles away, newly in debt, and apparently just off the route.