Four people died trying to reach the UK in small boats overnight — a man in his 30s or 40s when a boat capsized off Hardelot, and three more found unconscious aboard a boat that launched from Dunkirk. That's the story. Here's the BBC's headline on it: "Four people die after busiest day for small-boat crossings this year." * Look at the architecture of that sentence. The people are gone by word four, and the headline moves on to its actual interest: the record. 752 arrivals. Nine boats. Busiest day of the year. The dead get the front half of the sentence; the statistic gets the point of it. And "after" is doing quiet work — it stamps four deaths onto a traffic bulletin, the way rail operators write "delays after earlier incident." * The Guardian, working from the same facts, wrote: "Four people found dead on small boats after trying to cross Channel." No stat. No record. The headline ends where the story is — with people who got on a boat and didn't get off it. Both outlets chose "people" over "migrants," and that's worth crediting. The difference is who shares the marquee. The Guardian gave it to nobody. The BBC gave half of it to the Home Office's dashboard. * And that dashboard isn't neutral furniture. "Busiest day for crossings" is precisely the frame in which small boats are a volume problem — a number that ticks up and alarms people. Wire four deaths to that number and the story quietly rearranges: not "four humans died," but "the numbers are now so high that people are dying." One of those is an obituary. The other is a policy graph with casualties on it. * Euronews picked a third road: "Four migrants die trying to cross Channel from France to Britain." Different noun, different verb. "Migrants," not "people" — category first, person second. And "die trying" — grammatically, the attempt is what killed them. There's no room in that sentence for the gangs running so-called taxi boats along the coast, the ones even the BBC's own body copy describes picking up "paying customers who are waiting in the sea." Just the dead, and their decision. * The BBC story closes with Prime Minister Burnham — asked about Trump's remark that the UK has a "huge immigration problem" — saying Britain has made "significant progress" on getting arrival numbers down. That's the final note of a story about four deaths: progress, on the numbers. By paragraph twelve, the people from paragraph one had already become part of the total. * A headline only holds one protagonist. The Guardian chose the dead. Euronews chose their decision. The BBC chose the busiest day of the year — and made four people share it.