Day nine of the Ceuta story, and it has officially changed genre. Spain announced Friday night that from midnight, every plane and ferry arriving from Italy gets passport, nationality and visa checks until September 7 — retaliation for the identical checks Italy slapped on arrivals from Spain last week. France 24's headline: "Spain imposes border checks on Italy amid Ceuta migration row." The BBC: "Spain to impose border controls against Italy as row over Ceuta migrant influx intensifies." Two newsrooms, one noun: row. A row is what neighbours have about a hedge. This is two EU members dismantling Schengen at each other, with a hundred bodies in the story's rearview mirror. * Watch what the "row" frame does to the cast list. The people quoted now are ministries: Spain defending "the interests and dignity of its citizens," Rome refusing to accept "ultimatums," Italian officials promising — this is real — that their checkpoints do "everything possible" to ensure "maximum comfort" for European citizens in the queue. Queue comfort has entered the Ceuta story. You know who has left it? The people it was about. * They're still there, if you scroll. The BBC's own article — and credit for including it at all — reports that nearly 1,400 minors, "some of them 'very young boys and girls,'" remain stranded in Ceuta. That fact sits in paragraph 19, below the queue-comfort diplomacy and the Sánchez-versus-Meloni personality frame. When the crossings began, we wrote that everyone got a headline except the people in the water. Nine days on, here's the sequel: everyone got a checkpoint except the children in the holding centres. * And the absurdity is sitting right in the copy, unleaned-on. Madrid itself says Italy's checks rest on "spurious arguments," because the migrants who entered Ceuta "had no way of entering the Schengen area" — and nearly all of them were returned to Morocco within days, as we tracked when 97% of the 'swarm' went home. So Italy is screening tourists for people who legally and physically aren't coming, and its own stated end-condition is that checks stay "until security and terrorist risks for Italy have been completely eliminated." Completely eliminated. No border in human history has met that standard, which is presumably the point. That quote deserved a headline of its own; both outlets filed it as furniture. * Meanwhile the panic fueling round two is running on fumes the coverage itself documents: no second wave has materialised, the rumors trace to social media posts, the EU's migration commissioner blames disinformation by criminal networks, and the Guardian reported just today that Russia-linked accounts spent the crisis pumping far-right narratives about Ceuta. Follow that chain: a disinformation-inflated panic is now physically re-bordering Europe — and the headline vocabulary for this is the same word you'd use for an argument about a parking space, scored like a tennis match, with the Czechs calling for Spain's suspension and Finland backing Italy like it's group-stage standings. * France 24 sits in a particular seat here: it's the French state's international channel, and every one of those newly-checked flights between Spain and Italy crosses French airspace. If Schengen's unraveling is a "row," it's a row happening directly over the newsroom. When the queues start at midnight, keep the order of operations straight — a court ruling, a panic built partly on fake posts, a hundred dead, 1,400 stranded kids — and then, last and loudest, the only part that made the marquee: two governments having a row.