Reuters filed it at 12:23 GMT with the plainest headline available: "100 people died during Ceuta border rush, says Ceuta leader." Subject, verb, number, attribution, done. Five hours later the BBC published the same speech under this: "Thousands of migrants still in Ceuta after border crisis, local leader says." Same man, same committee room, same Thursday afternoon. One newsroom counted the dead. The other counted the ones who are still there. * One sentence of background, because you can get the news anywhere: Ceuta's mayor-president Juan Jesus Vivas told a European Parliament committee on Thursday that around 100 people died in the late-July crossings from Morocco, and that between 3,000 and 5,000 of the roughly 78,000 who came are still in the city. * We have been grading this one since it started. On July 31 we flagged The Washington Post's "overrun" and Fox's "swarm" — the verbs that quietly turn people into weather — and pointed out that Fox's story that day never mentioned the 57 dead at all. On day two we watched every politician in Europe get to be the subject of a sentence while the death count wobbled between sources somewhere below the fold, and we guessed that within a couple of days the people it actually happened to would be gone from the story. Day seven: the toll has nearly doubled, and the headline is a census of the living. * The standfirst is where the real work gets done: "The Spanish territory's mayor-president also says 100 deaths occurred as a result of 78,000 migrants crossing from neighbouring Morocco." Two moves in one line. First, "also" — the word for the extra bit, the by-the-way, the thing you mention on the way out. A hundred people is not an "also." Second, deaths that "occurred as a result of" the crossing. There is no sea in that sentence. No breakwater, no fence, no crush, no water. The people who drowned are grammatically the reason they drowned. * Credit where it is due, and it is due: the BBC's paragraph two carries Vivas's "profound sorrow" over an "irreparable tragedy," and the number sits high in the piece, not buried in paragraph nine. Nobody hid anything. This is a ranking, not a cover-up. Somebody had two facts out of one speech — a hundred dead, three thousand still there — and decided which one gets the biggest type. Most people only ever read that biggest type. For most of the audience, the ranking is the story. * Fox, for its part, put the toll right in the headline this week: "death toll hits about 100." Genuine improvement on last Friday, when the dead did not make the article at all. Then comes its first sentence, in which the 3,000 to 5,000 remain "after hordes of mostly military-aged men rushed into the Spanish enclave." A week ago "hordes of military aged men" was a quotation — Fox wrapped it in quote marks and hung a congressman's name on it. It has since slipped out of the quote marks and become the furniture. That is how a phrase gets naturalised: borrow it from a politician, run it a few times, quietly drop the punctuation. * The number that has moved most in this story is the one that keeps getting the least headline space. 57 last Friday. 72 by Sunday, when Al Jazeera led with it. At least 88 on Monday, per Euronews. About 100 on Thursday — the day the two biggest names on the story filed it under "also" and "hits about." A death toll nearly doubling in a week has been treated, from the start, as the subplot.