The headline is a choice
An athlete's best day was reported through his family's worst. Look closely at why, and you find something less comfortable than lazy journalism, with a bit of it pointing back at the rest of us.
This weekend Sean McCann reached a Commonwealth Games final in Glasgow. A personal best, years in the making, swum in front of his own country.
You would not always have known that from the coverage. A lot of it led not with his name, and not with his swim, but with the fact that he is the brother of a girl the world has reported on for nearly twenty years. Some outlets kept his name out of the headline altogether. Others found room for it only in a photo caption.
The easy response is to call that lazy, or ghoulish. I am not sure it is either.
The frame was already there
Watch what an editor is actually doing when they write "Madeleine McCann's brother reaches final" instead of "Sean McCann reaches final".
They are not weighing his worth as an athlete. They are reaching for words a reader will recognise, because recognition is what gets read. "Madeleine McCann's brother" is, in the coldest sense, a search term. It is what people type, what an algorithm surfaces, what a tired thumb stops scrolling for. "Sean McCann", for now, is not.
The frame was already sitting in the reader's head. The headline simply fits the story into it.
Everyone is someone's relative
Once you notice it, you see it everywhere, and rarely where there is any tragedy involved at all.
Miriam González Durántez is a senior international lawyer, reported for years as "Nick Clegg's wife". Cherie Booth, a formidable QC, becomes "Mrs Blair". Stella McCartney built one of the most successful fashion houses in Britain and is still, three decades in, "Paul McCartney's daughter".
None of that is cruelty either. It is the same mechanism. The relation is the frame the audience already holds, so the relation is what leads. Your own achievement, however large, is the less familiar term, and the less familiar term does not travel as far.
The part we would rather not look at
Here is the uncomfortable bit.
We tend to talk about media framing as something done to people by editors, as though there were a room somewhere deciding who is allowed to be the main character of their own life. But every headline is tested, instantly and constantly, against one thing: whether we click it. "Madeleine McCann's brother" leads because it works, and it works because we reward it.
The frame is not really imposed on us. It is confirmed by us, a thousand times an hour. Which makes the way a person gets reported less a verdict handed down from above, and more a mirror held up to everyone doing the reading.
That is worth sitting with, because it holds for the trivial stories and the serious ones alike.
Sean McCann swam the race of his life on Saturday. Whether he ever gets to be "Sean McCann, the swimmer", rather than somebody's brother, will not really be decided by him, or even by an editor.
It will be decided by which headline the rest of us choose to open.
Jamie Greene spent years in broadcast and digital media, then a decade in the Scottish Parliament. He founded Kempock, which advises organisations on how those two worlds actually work.