Three members of one London family drowned off Shoreham on Tuesday — a father, his partner, their 14-year-old daughter; a younger daughter is in hospital. Every newsroom in Britain had to answer the same quiet question before publishing: who were they? Four outlets gave four different answers, and the differences are a masterclass in what a headline decides for you. * Start with the BBC, which needed three attempts. First: "Three dead after family get into difficulty in sea near Shoreham Port." Then: "Shoreham incident leaves three family members dead." Finally, once police released names: "Palestinian couple and teenage daughter who died in water off Shoreham named by police." You can watch breaking-news caution harden into fact in real time — and to be fair, early caution about an unexplained drowning is defensible journalism, not cowardice. But notice the house grammar along the way: nobody drowns at the BBC. People "get into difficulty," an "incident leaves" them dead. The sea, as usual in these headlines, is never charged. * The Guardian went with: "Couple who died with their daughter off Sussex coast named by police." No "Palestinian," no "refugee" — a family defined entirely by what happened to them, not where they came from. That's a choice with a logic to it: they died on a beach day, not in a small boat, so why should their origin be the headline? It's the most privacy-shaped of the four. It is also the only one where you could read the headline and learn nothing about who these people were. * Al Jazeera made the opposite call: "Palestinian refugee and two relatives drown off English coast." For AJ, the identity is the story — its report traced the father, Hossam El-Khawas, back to the Rashidieh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, and quoted the Palestinian embassy, which was tracking the case. In that frame, a man who survived a camp near Tyre and built a life in London, only to drown on an English beach, is an arc worth naming. Note AJ also used the plainest verb on offer: "drown." No difficulty, no incident. * And then there's the Mirror: "Shoreham deaths - latest: First pictures of tragic refugee family pulled from sea." Everything about that headline is doing retail work. "First pictures" — the commodity. "Tragic" — the pre-installed emotion, in case you weren't sure how to feel about dead parents. "Pulled from sea" — the cinematic verb. The Mirror kept "refugee" but attached it to "tragic," which converts an identity into a pathos label. This is grief formatted as inventory. * Here's the thing that makes this spread worth your attention: if the same three people had died crossing the Channel, every one of these outlets would have written "migrants" before lunch, and several would have counted them rather than named them. Because they drowned the way any British family might — a swim on a hot day — the press had to decide, on deadline, whether "Palestinian refugee" was who they were or merely where they'd been. The Guardian said it wasn't headline material. AJ said it was the whole point. The BBC took a day to decide. The Mirror asked if you'd like to see the pictures. * None of these headlines is false. That's precisely why they're worth reading side by side. Sussex Police say a review of CCTV and witness accounts points to a tragic accident, nothing more — which means the only thing left to edit was meaning. Four desks, one death, four verdicts on what a refugee is allowed to simply be: a father, a couple, a symbol, or a picture.