Scare quotes are quotation marks wrapped around a word an outlet is not willing to assert on its own authority, so it can print the word anyway while keeping a technical exit. In a headline, that exit rarely survives contact with the reader: the punctuation is legible to an editor defending the piece later, not to someone skimming a phone. What the quote marks are supposed to signal (this is someone else’s claim, contested, unresolved) gets read instead as description.
- Survives the trip, loses the job. Two UK outlets covered the same story, restrictions lifted on naming a doctor after his death, with headlines calling him Lucy Letby’s “crush” and “boyfriend.” Both labels came from a prosecution theory the defendant denied on the record, and both outlets said so, correctly, several hundred words into the body. The quote marks survived the trip from body to headline as punctuation; they lost their job as a hedge. A reader who stops at the headline receives “boyfriend” as a status, not as a lawyer’s suggestion.
- Runs in reverse. A word can also escape the quote marks it started inside. A BBC report on a PMQs clash quoted a party spokesperson accusing the PM of “prioritising the ballooning benefits bill.” Further down, the same piece switched to its own neutral voice: “Spending on benefits has ballooned in recent years.” The word travelled from someone’s attack line into the outlet’s own description without ever being examined in between.
- Selective punctuation in the same headline. A magazine’s headline quoted a billionaire calling his critics “venomous sewer workers,” in quote marks, then called the reporting he was answering “attacks,” unquoted. The insult is flagged as his opinion; nothing flags the framing word as anyone’s opinion at all, though calling an investigation an “attack” is already a verdict, not a description. The body even uses “investigations” once, but the demotion is done by the headline, which is as far as most readers get.
- Two harvest headlines hung on the scare-quoted word ‘disappointing’, attributed to the findings. In the quoted material in either article the word never appears; the report’s own vocabulary is ‘challenging’, ‘difficult’, ‘highly variable’.
- A court-report headline put quotation marks around the act, “Channel ‘boat slashing’”, and none around the label it gave the defendant. The quotes held the alleged act at arm’s length while the label went in unmarked.
- A case nickname, ‘Putney pusher’, rode in quotation marks in all four headlines about a man who was arrested, never charged, and later died. The quotation marks shielded the outlets; the brand still did the convicting.
