That's a reductio ad absurdum, since (begging your pardon) your revised headline sounds bad and lacks punch. Meanwhile the original headline qua headline seems fine. Headlines are their own specialized context with their own rules, somewhat different from the main rules. You might even say they have a domain-specific grammar.
I'm upvoting your comment anyway because the concept of a subgrammar never occurred to me before and it's kind of neat. I'd be surprised if it weren't a well-known phenomenon among linguists though.
It's true that news headlines obey their own little grammatical rules. Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) has mentioned this a number of times. Tho noone in the field really cares about it, because its not all the relevant to language on the whole.
I'm upvoting your comment anyway because the concept of a subgrammar never occurred to me before and it's kind of neat. I'd be surprised if it weren't a well-known phenomenon among linguists though.