On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Andy Burnham gave BBC Breakfast one interview containing one prison announcement with three moving parts: anyone convicted of unlawful killing — including the men who dragged PC Andrew Harper to his death — is now excluded from early release; the notorious IPP indefinite sentences will finally be ended; and foreign prisoners will be deported to make room. One policy. Then Britain's newsrooms each sawed it in half and handed their readers the half they'd ordered. * The BBC's news headline: 'PC Harper's killers to stay in jail as PM announces changes to early release scheme.' The protagonist is the victim's family's campaign; the verb is stay; the emotional payload is justice served. Everything in that headline is true. It's the half of the announcement that keeps people IN prison. * The Guardian's headline: 'Andy Burnham pledge to end indefinite jail terms — a step towards healing.' The protagonist is the campaigners; the payload is mercy; the quote is from a former IPP prisoner. Everything in that headline is also true. It's the half of the announcement that lets people OUT of prison. Same speech, same morning — a law-and-order story on one front page and a justice-reform story on the other, each tuned to its audience like a radio station. * Here's the bit neither headline carries: the two halves are the same half. Burnham conceded his exclusions mean 'hundreds' more people staying in a system that is over 97% full — and the space for them is supposed to come from the IPP releases and the deportations. Except, as the BBC's own analysis piece lays out with admirable dryness, ending IPP sentences needs legislation that could take years, there are no new deportation agreements with anyone, and the Ministry of Justice warned this month that more exemptions risked 'prisons reaching capacity and collapsing.' Short term, in the analysis desk's words, the announcement works 'only by making prisons even more full.' The trade is real; the payment is an IOU. * And a detail worth framing: Thames Valley's Chief Constable declared 'Today is not about politics.' On the very same broadcaster, government insiders describe the new exemptions as a 'political decision.' Both quotes, both on the BBC, both Sunday. Even Debbie Adlam, Harper's mother — the person this announcement was built for — told BBC Breakfast she is 'glad and really grateful' but worries 'immensely for those it doesn't happen for,' because 'the overall system has left some huge gaps still.' The winning family read the fine print faster than most headlines did. * Credit where due: the Guardian's actual reporting on the IPP half is the kind of journalism nobody wins clicks for — 856 people still inside on a sentence abolished in 2012, eight in ten of them a full decade past their minimum term, 1,415 more recalled from licence. It quotes Tommy Nicol, who described his four-year-minimum sentence as 'psychological torture of a person who is doing 99 years' in a handwritten complaint, nine months before he killed himself inside. These are the least fashionable underdogs in Britain and the Guardian has stayed on them for years. But the headline outsourced its verdict to a campaigner's quote — 'a step towards healing' — and the capacity catch, the years-off legislation, the IOU? Not in the package. * We've been here before. In July, when this same early-release scheme hit the Harper backlash and Burnham 'paused' it, we wrote that a pause is not a cancellation — it's a calendar note. The note came due on Sunday, and the settlement is genuinely elegant politics: the tabloid-facing half locks killers in, the reform-facing half frees the forgotten, and the arithmetic connecting them lives in a sidebar. The honest headline — 'Burnham keeps hundreds in jail with space he won't have for years' — ran nowhere. The BBC's analysis desk at least asked 'but at what cost?' That question mark did more journalism than either front page.