I don't have a strong view about this, and I certainly understand why the BBC is using quotation marks in the way it is. But if I were an editor at the BBC, I think I would be uncomfortable with the fact that the quotations communicate the wrong message to so many readers -- and, worse, mistakenly suggest that my publication is being snarky or skeptical of the claims highlighted in the headline. This seems like very much the opposite of the quotation marks' desired effect.

You're right, even if this usage may be perfectly acceptable, if it gives a lot of people the wrong idea it's probably time to change.

Kowtowing to the lowest common denominator shouldn't be done lightly. We are on a site called Hacker News, after all.

> Kowtowing to the lowest common denominator shouldn't be done lightly

Certainly not when you put it like that! But you might also call it "communicating effectively with your audience." So maybe kowtowing isn't so bad after all when it just involves responding to the linguistic conventions observed by your readers, and the goal is simply communication.

I also don't know that people who read quotation marks as connoting doubt, in the absence of any other evident reason for them, can fairly be called "the lowest common denominator."

> The use of quotation marks to indicate sarcasm or doubt is pretty new

I'm not sure that's true. A writer will always have some reason to use literal quotations instead of their own rendition of things. What makes you certain that skepticism is only a recent addition to the list of possible such reasons?

An extensive scope of reading material, most likely. If you like reading enough to read across multiple decades and centuries then one can usefully make such observations from one's personal corpus. This isn't something that can be easily automated as machine learning is not yet that good at the semantic level, but I concur with the grandparent poster that the ironic use of quotation marks is a relatively new journalistic trend.