Even the BBC appears to use them rather too liberally. Take a look at this article. There’s no suggestion anywhere that the girl might have made it up; warehouse have apologised and compensated her, the tool in the photo looks like the sort of thing that would be used for cutting canvas in a bag factory; so why the scare quotes around ‘finds blade in bag’ in the headline? Why say she ‘claims she pulled out a cutting device’ rather than just reporting that she did?

It’s a weird article; I can’t decide if it’s just sloppily written, or if the author is trying to play on the public’s fear of teenagers with knives. In either case, it’s below the BBC — they should know better.