Journalists and editors swap out words all the time, particularly when they aren't explicitly quoting somebody. People who write for a living tend to like words and pick words form sets of synonyms that suit their personal preferences. Any story that has been written about by more than one writer/editor will almost certainly have headlines that mean the same thing using different words.

A current example grabbed from google news:

"Two dams in Inner Mongolia collapse after heavy rain"

"Two dams in China's Inner Mongolia collapse after torrential rain"

"Heavy rain" and "torrential rain" mean basically the same thing. Why does one headline use one phrase, and the other another? Is this some sort of malicious attempt to propagandize at us? Or is it just an editor/writer who fancies the word 'torrential'? I think it's the second.