The Washington Post's headline on the Ceuta crisis: "Migrants overrun the Spanish outpost Ceuta, stirring White House outrage." Eleven words, two big choices. The verb: "overrun" — the thing enemy armies do to defensive positions. And the consequence deemed worth the headline: not the deaths. The outrage. * One sentence of background: roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into Spain's enclave of Ceuta over a few days, Spain deployed the army and has returned most of them, Italy suspended Schengen travel with Spain — and, per the Spanish government on Friday, at least 57 people died, many of them drowning off Tarajal beach trying to swim around the border fence. * "Overrun" has a job, and its job is to make the sentence's subject into a force rather than people. Positions get overrun. Garrisons get overrun. The people in this story were unarmed, on foot and in the water, and 57 of them are dead. The Post would never print "hordes" — that word is for a different kind of outlet. "Overrun" is the respectable cousin. Same costume, better tailoring. * Fox News dressed it down for the occasion: "Firebrand rep unloads on socialist prime minister as 'hordes of military aged men' swarm European country." The "hordes of military aged men" part sits safely in quotation marks — it belongs to Texas Rep. Brandon Gill. But "swarm" has no quotation marks. That's Fox's own verb, picked in-house, and it's the one we use for insects. And here's the detail we checked twice: the article, top to bottom, does not mention that anyone died. Not the drownings, not the stampede. The deaths had been reported since Thursday. A story where 57 human beings drowned, told entirely as a story about a congressman being cross with a prime minister. * It is not editorially difficult to do better, because two newsrooms did it on the same deadline. Al Jazeera: "Spain's PM visits Ceuta after 57 migrants die breaching border from Morocco" — the dead in the headline, and the migrants get a human verb: to die. NPR, earlier in the count: "At least 18 die after breach of border between Morocco and Spanish territory of Ceuta." Same story, same hours, headlines that remembered who the casualties were. * And a small flourish from France 24 worth stealing: "Trump blames Spain for migrant chaos despite return of tens of thousands to Morocco." That "despite" is a fact-check living inside a headline — claim attributed, claim graded, ten words, done. It can be done. * Verb choice on a story like this isn't decoration. "Overrun" and "swarm" quietly assign the roles: the border is the victim, the people are the weather. The death toll assigns them differently. When the metaphor and the death toll disagree, the headline should side with the death toll.