winterbadger | OK, this is just sloppy journalism

BBC headline: "Ex-Bosnia army chief 'not guilty'"

First line of story: The former chief of the Bosnian Muslim army, Rasim Delic, has pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at the tribunal in The Hague.

The BBC has gottne much, much worse in its sloppy and unprofessional headline writing, including massive and trivialized use of quotation marks and impenetrably stacked nouns. It's as if there's a contest to see who can convey the least in the smallest amount of words.

In this case, they manage to convey an impression that is simply untrue by using cutesy quotation marking. In fact, it would have taken only six more characters (for which there was plenty of room) to write "Ex-Bosnia army chief pleads not guilty". And they could easily have said "Bosnian general pleads not guilty", thus avoiding the horrific "ex-Bosnia army chief" noun stack (ex- what? ex-Bosnian? clearly not--he's still Bosnian).

Grrr.