Here are the numbers Spain's interior minister gave after Tuesday's emergency EU meeting: 72,000 people crossed into Ceuta since last Thursday. 70,000 of them have already gone back to Morocco. About 2,000 remain. More than 80 people died trying to cross. * Euronews put the math straight in the headline: "Spain says 70,000 of 72,000 migrants who crossed into Ceuta have already returned." Not thrilling. Not cinematic. Just the actual news — which is that last week's great European invasion turned out to be, for 97% of its participants, a round trip. * Now, you may remember the vocabulary from when the crossings began. "Swarm" was the word on Fox's front page — we checked it at the time. The Washington Post went with "overrun." Insect verbs, siege verbs. Words that promise the story only moves in one direction. * So what does Fox's Ceuta desk do on the day the swarm officially un-swarmed? Here's Tuesday's headline: "Ceuta migrant surge exposes Spain-Morocco tensions as Islamist groups reportedly seek to exploit border crisis." The panic didn't get corrected. It got a sequel. * And check what's holding up that "reportedly." The article's source for the Islamist-exploitation angle is a single research fellow at a Washington think tank, who wrote that the crisis "allows those movements to transform public frustration… into a broader political attack." That's the whole load-bearing structure: one analyst's written assessment, promoted directly to a front-page verb. "Reportedly seek to exploit" — reported by whom? By the one person the article asked. * To be fair to Fox: the 70,000-returned figure is in their article, near the top. The facts made it into the store. They just didn't make it into the window — the window got the threat forecast. * One more thing that didn't make Fox's article at all: the more than 80 people who died. That number lives in Euronews's second paragraph. * This is the life cycle of a panic headline. It's never wrong, exactly — it just gets replaced by the next one before anyone asks. "Swarm" week ended with 97% of the swarm home in Morocco, so the desk moved on to what Islamists might reportedly do next. Euronews printed a number instead. Numbers make terrible television, which is exactly why they make good news.