Grant Milnor Hyde observed that they give the impression of uncertainty in a newspaper's content. Many question headlines were used, for example, in reporting of Bharatiya Janata Party in-fighting in 2004, because no politicians went on record to confirm or deny facts, such as "Is Venkaiah Naidu on his way out?" Because this implication is known to readers, guides giving advice to newspaper editors state that so-called "question heads" should be used sparingly. Roger Simon characterized the practice as justifying "virtually anything, no matter how unlikely", giving " Hillary to Replace Biden on Ticket?" and " Romney to Endorse Gay Marriage Between Corporations?" as hypothetical examples of such a practice. ![]() ![]() Phrasing headlines as questions is a tactic employed by newspapers that do not "have the facts required to buttress the nut graph". In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine (all percentages rounded by Linander). Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no". Ī 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Studies Ī 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no". To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Ī similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr's suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it. ![]() History īetteridge's name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?" ( Schonfeld 2009): It has also been referred to as the "journalistic principle" and in 2007 was referred to in commentary as "an old truism among journalists". The maxim has been cited by other names since 1991, when a published compilation of Murphy's law variants called it "Davis's law", a name that also appears online without any explanation of who Davis was. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.
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