Back when news was printed on paper, they needed to make the space taken up by a headline count, since it uses a much larger font. The space taken up by a 36pt "AND" could easily be a couple paragraphs of 11pt text. Because of this, the journalism industry developed its own version of English grammar for headlines which was meant to be economical with printing space while being punchy and attention-grabbing, and also being as unambiguous as possible.

This syntax has survived into the age of digital news because of industry conventions.