Been watching the news about the three women murdered in Ipswich during the last fortnight and the two further missing women, when it occurred to me - what is it with journalists' use of adjectives in headlines?

'The three murdered prostitutes' they screech. Do they ever say, 'The three murdered plumbers'? No, they bloody well don't. Are prostitutes somehow so much less human than the rest of us that they have to be defined, even in death, by their profession?

Which leads me to the other over-used adjective - 'black', as in 'the murdered black teenager' etc etc. This drives me nuts. The death of a teenager is always a tragedy, irrespective of colour and can it really be the journalists' intention always to imply that any murder of a black person must, by definition, be racist? I don't know the figures for murders of black people but am guessing that they probably mirror those for whites and other races, i.e. that the vast majority of murders are carried out by perpetrators known to the victim.

This is all so irritating and cynical. Journalists, of all people, must know the power of words and that the choice of one particular word over another is far more meaningful than it would appear at first glance. Let's hear simple headlines, for Gods' sake, especially on the BBC that we all pay for.