It's a feature, not a bug. Sometime you do it to use the shortest word possible in a headline, other times for variety, but as Gene Weingarten points out, also to "cover" yourself, or out of dull and stilted habit and a disregard for readers and their real-life experience, forgetting that your work is not an end in itself but serves a purpose in everyday life.
Although some of the terms he says only journalists use have come back into more normal use because they're used in the media so much, or maybe that's just in places like Washington, where I live, or professions like mine. But others definitely haven't: "blaze" (for a house fire), vex, slay ...
Gene fingers journos in language imbroglio
And there's even a version on Youtube!