Two headlines, one arrival: writing a style guide

A is not 'just facts'; it is a set of choices, and so is B.

• Referring expressions. «Inmigrantes ilegales» turns an administrative category into an identity, and does so as an epithet rather than a sourced legal finding. Alternatives - «venezolanos», «personas en situación irregular», «migrantes» - are not stylistic variations; each commits the paper to a different claim.
• Agency (transitivity). In A the migrants are agents: they «saturan» and «colapsan». The state, the border agency and the reception system are absent from the clause, so failure appears to be caused by the arrivals rather than by capacity. B reverses this: «Chile recibe» makes the state the agent and frames the same event as generosity.
• Quantification. B gives 4,200; A gives no number at all. «Saturan» asserts that a threshold has been passed without evidence, and that is harder to challenge than a figure. Numbers can be checked; a verb of excess cannot.
• Presupposition. «La frontera» presumes a single known frontier. «Que huyen de la crisis» presupposes a crisis and a motive, and locates the cause outside Chile - a framing available to both generous and defensive uses. Neither headline says «refugiados», and correctly so: refugee status is a legal determination, not a synonym for migrant; using it for all 4,200 would be a legal claim neither paper can support.

The claim that A is 'just facts' fails because each of these is a selection. That does not make B neutral: it does different work, including obscuring whether reception capacity was adequate. The useful question for a style guide is not 'which is biased' but 'which choices can we defend, and can we show the evidence for them'.

Policy 1 - migration vocabulary (three lines).

• Describe status precisely and attribute it: «migrantes venezolanos», «personas en situación irregular», with the source of any legal characterisation named in the body.
• Never use «ilegal» as a noun or as an identity for a person; use «refugiado/a» only where status has been granted or formally sought, and say which.
• Give numbers and name agencies wherever they exist; avoid verbs of excess («saturan», «invaden», «colapsan») unless the text evidences the claim.

Reasoning: the guide constrains vocabulary, not facts. «Ilegal» is also imprecise - irregular entry is an administrative matter, and many Spanish-language style guides, Fundéu among them, recommend «indocumentado» or «en situación irregular» for people. Strongest objection: 'this is linguistic engineering that softens a real problem.' Answer: precision is not softness; a paper can report a strained reception system in detail while naming people accurately, and readers trust a paper that shows its numbers more than one that reaches for a verb of invasion.

Policy 2 - inclusive language (one line).

• Formal station texts prefer lexical inclusion («todas las personas», «quienes»); presenters may use -e («todes») on air as their own register; the station neither requires nor bans it.

Reasoning: the audience includes young people who use the form and older listeners who find it jarring. A default plus permission serves both; a ban or a mandate produces a resignation. Strongest objection: 'inconsistent'. Answer: the policy is consistent - it assigns forms to registers, which is what style guides do. Note honestly that the RAE's grammar treats the masculine as the unmarked generic and has not endorsed -e in general language; that describes a norm rather than ruling on broadcasting policy, and usage is split.

Meeting tactic: settle these two principles in 45 minutes, put them on one page with three worked examples, and set a six-month review. Trying to settle every case in the room is how the meeting fails.