On Saturday we handed Al Jazeera the only medal in Lusaka. While the BBC's "resumes" headline napped through the weekend and AP compressed a suspended national vote count into one self-solving sentence, AJ had a correspondent in the room, quoting the election observers everyone else was ignoring. We regret to inform you the medal has been reassigned. * Tuesday morning, Zambia's electoral commission declared Hakainde Hichilema re-elected — 2,965,326 votes to Brian Mundubile's 1,856,217. Here's what else was true at declaration time, per the BBC's reporting: Mundubile says armed men knocked down his gate with an armoured vehicle and opened fire, and that former minister Mutotwe Kafwaya was shot in front of him and is now missing. Leading opposition figures were arrested in a raid the authorities tied to an alleged insurrection plot — Mundubile calls that a fabrication. And Mundubile himself is in hiding, in what his party told the BBC is a secure location under the protection of an international human rights body. That's your one sentence of background. Well, three. It was a busy declaration. * Now, Al Jazeera's own declaration story — "By Al Jazeera staff," datelined Lusaka, the site's lead telling of the result. Headline: "Hichilema re-elected as Zambia president amid opposition concerns over vote." Concerns. We searched the article body so you don't have to: "raid" appears zero times. "Arrest" — zero. Kafwaya — zero. "Hiding" — zero. * What the staff piece does contain: debt restructuring, the stabilising kwacha, "Africa's second-largest copper producer," a business-school professor pleased with the macroeconomic fundamentals, and a taxi driver who welcomed the result. The entire opposition side of declaration day is rendered as Mundubile's alliance having "raised concerns over aspects of the voting process," while his camp "called for scrutiny." The count suspension gets a single sentence that ends "before the count resumed" — crisis and happy ending in one breath, the exact construction we caught AP using on Saturday. Apparently it's contagious. * In fairness: aljazeera.com also published a second version, bylined to AFP and Reuters, and the wire copy carries what the staff copy doesn't — the raid, eleven arrests, an exchange of gunfire, the government's "militia activity" claim and the opposition's rebuttal. So the facts did make it onto the site. They just came in through the agency door, in the pooled copy every outlet gets. When Al Jazeera's own people sat down to write their own account, the raid evaporated and the copper flowed. Which of those two stories the newsroom considered THE story — that's the tell. * And the BBC, Saturday's villain? Full costume change. Monday it was back with the opposition arrests. Tuesday it filed the most complete account on our whole list: the armoured vehicle at the gate, "They came in to kill us," Kafwaya's family getting no explanation of his whereabouts, the SADC observer chief saying his team "recorded, but could not verify, reports of intimidation, assault, abduction and damage to property in five provinces," the EU mission's "uneven contest." We roasted the silence, so we'll say it plainly: this is what showing up looks like. * Almost. Look at the headline the BBC hung over all that reporting: Hichilema re-elected "as main rival in hiding over alleged threats." Alleged — for threats credible enough that an international human rights body took the man in, a detail the BBC itself confirmed with his party. It's the same hedge the same desk put on "alleged attacks on polling staff" on Friday, when the electoral commission had already stopped its own count over those attacks. The body files reporting; the headline applies gauze. Some reflexes survive even a good day. * Why this matters: declaration day is when a disputed election gets its permanent frame. Mundubile says he's going to court, so "whether the concerns hold up" is now a legal question that will take months. But a reader who got Tuesday's news from Al Jazeera's lead story learned that the kwacha has stabilised and the copper outlook is strong. The raid, the arrests, the man in hiding — that was all left in the wire copy, one click away, where the frame never has to answer for it.