Two firefighting helicopters collided over Psatha, west of Athens, on Sunday. Four crew between them; two didn't make it. Here's how the BBC headlined it: "Two crew killed as British pilot survives after firefighting helicopters collide in Greece." Look at the structure of that sentence. The dead are "two crew" — no names, no countries. The survivor gets a nationality. Because it's the reader's. * The men who died were a Greek and a Danish national — the BBC's own story says so, plainly and promptly. They were flying water drops over a burning forest in gale-force winds, which was arguably the most dangerous job in Europe that afternoon. In the headline, they're a crew manifest. The passport that lived is the plot. * And here's the detail that gives the game away: there were TWO survivors. The second helicopter carried a Greek crew member alongside the British pilot — both walked away with light injuries, both went to the same hospital. One of them made the headline. The other doesn't exist in it. Two men, identical outcomes, one available headline slot — and it went to the one with the familiar passport. * Now watch Euronews, which writes for a pan-European audience and therefore has no home team to flatter: "Aerial firefighters take off to tackle major wildfire in Greece after two killed in helicopter collision." No passports in the headline at all. And when the body text gets to the people, it starts with the dead: "one Greek and one Danish national, died when their helicopter collided." The men who were lost lead the story. The survivors follow. * The convention has a name — domestication. Every national outlet does some version of it; "Briton among survivors" is practically its own genre of headline. The logic is that readers care more about people who could be them. Fine. But the logic has a cost, and the cost is always paid by the same people: the ones who did the dying in the wrong passport. * A headline is a ranking. Sunday's ranking, per the BBC: one British survival outranks one Danish and one Greek death. If the pilot who lived had been Danish, the headline would have simply read "two crew killed" — and honestly, it would have been the better headline.