Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, won its court case today. Its own quote on the verdict: "a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail's journalism." * Magnificent. Not "we won." Not even "the judge agreed with us." Magnificent. That's a word you reach for after climbing a mountain, not after a High Court ruling on how you source stories. * CNN covered the exact same ruling under a very different headline: "Prince Harry loses privacy case against UK tabloid publisher." Notice who's the subject there. Not the Mail. Harry. He's the one doing something -- losing. The Mail barely gets a noun; it's just "UK tabloid publisher," background scenery for someone else's defeat. * Same verdict, same day, same 97 dismissed claims. One outlet made itself the hero of the sentence and handed itself an adjective usually reserved for symphonies. The other made the loser the whole headline and didn't bother naming the winner. * Here's the thing about grading your own homework: you're allowed to, nobody's going to stop you, and you will always give yourself an A. A publisher calling its own court win "magnificent" isn't lying -- it won, clean, all 97 claims dismissed. It's just doing marketing in a sentence shaped like news. * CNN's version has the opposite problem, just quieter. Make the loser the main character, and an actual legal win for a newspaper's reporting practices reads like an afterthought. * Read only the Mail's line and you'd think journalism itself had been crowned. Read only CNN's and you'd barely notice journalism won anything at all.