The irritating thing about prescriptivists is that most of them are so fucking terrible at it.
I think it's even stranger than that. Given how easy it is to do a web search, and given that you've just seen headline in a major newspaper use the word, think of how much overconfidence you'd have to have to declare to it's not a word without even doing the search before posting. And despite this seemingly reckless disregard for truth or accuracy, he's probably living a happier and more successful existence than I. Makes me wonder why I make things so hard.
That, and so many of them are trying to turn English into an English-based conlang, with rules English speakers generally don't follow and have never followed, and then they have the utter temerity to get angry when nobody wants to agree with them that splitting infinitives is "wrong" because of some rule they made up out of flatus and nothing.