Betteridge's law of headlines is an
adage
A proverb (from ) or an adage is a simple, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience. Proverbs are often metaphorical and are an example of formulaic speech, formulaic language. A proverbial phrase ...
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. 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. The adage does not apply to questions that are more
open-ended than strict
yes–no question
In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, is a closed-ended question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus ...
s. For example, "What Should We Expect From Evolving Import-Export Policy?" is an open-ended question, whereas "Should We Expect an Embargo on Widgets?" is of closed form.
The maxim has been cited by other names since 1991, when a published compilation of
Murphy's law
Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
Though similar statements and concepts have been made over the course of history, the law itself was coined by, and named after, Americ ...
variants called it "Davis's law", a name that also appears online without any explanation of who Davis was. It has also been referred to as the "journalistic principle" and in 2007 was referred to in commentary as "an old
truism
A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device, and is the opposite of a falsism.
In philosophy, a sentence which asserts incomplete truth con ...
among journalists".
History
Betteridge's name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
I ...
article that carried the headline "Did
Last.fm
Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Utilizing a music recommender system known as "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm creates a detailed profile of each user's musical preferences by recording the details of the tracks they ...
Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the
RIAA
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/o ...
?":
A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor
Andrew Marr
Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959) is a British journalist, author, broadcaster and presenter. Beginning his career as a political commentator at ''The Scotsman,'' he subsequently edited ''The Independent'' newspaper from 1996 to ...
in his 2004 book ''My Trade'', among Marr's suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles:
Studies
A 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 that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
A 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
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogat ...
and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
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.
Question headlines
Phrasing headlines as questions is a tactic employed by newspapers that do not "have the facts required to buttress the
nut graph".
Roger Simon characterized the practice as justifying "virtually anything, no matter how unlikely", giving "
Hillary to Replace
Biden
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who was the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he served as the 47th vice p ...
on Ticket?" and "
Romney to Endorse Gay Marriage Between Corporations?" as hypothetical examples of such a practice. Many question headlines were used, for example, in reporting of
Bharatiya Janata Party
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; , ) is a political party in India and one of the two major List of political parties in India, Indian political parties alongside the Indian National Congress. BJP emerged out from Syama Prasad Mukherjee's ...
in-fighting in 2004, because no politicians went on record to confirm or deny facts, such as "Is
Venkaiah Naidu
Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu (born 1 July 1949) is an Indian politician who served as the vice president of India from 2017 to 2022. He has also served as the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, minister of Housing and Urban Pover ...
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.
Freelance writer R. Thomas Berner calls them "gimmickry". Grant Milnor Hyde observed that they give the impression of uncertainty in a newspaper's content. When
Linton Andrews
Sir William Linton Andrews (27 May 1886 – 27 September 1972) was a British journalist and newspaper editor.
Early life
Andrews was born in Kingston upon Hull on 27 May 1886. He was the son of William Andrews and Jeanie Leslie Andrews. He ...
worked at the ''
Daily Mail
The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily Middle-market newspaper, middle-market Tabloid journalism, tabloid conservative newspaper founded in 1896 and published in London. , it has the List of newspapers in the United Kingdom by circulation, h ...
'' after the
First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, one of the rules set by
Lord Northcliffe was to avoid question headlines, unless the question itself reflected a national issue.
Question headlines are not legally sound when it comes to avoiding defamation. The
Supreme Court of Oklahoma held in 1913, in its decision in ''Spencer v. Minnick'', that "A man cannot libel another by the publication of language the meaning and damaging effect of which is clear to all men, and where the identity of the person meant cannot be doubted, and then escape liability through the use of a question mark." The use of question headlines as a form of
sensationalism
In journalism and mass media, sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emoti ...
has a long history, including the 9 June 1883, headline in
Joseph Pulitzer
Joseph Pulitzer ( ; born , ; April 10, 1847 – October 29, 1911) was a Hungarian-American politician and a newspaper publisher of the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' and the ''New York World''. He became a leading national figure in the U.S. Democ ...
's ''
New York World
The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 to 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers as a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under publisher Jo ...
'', "Was It Peppermint Mary?"
The story, about a jewellery store that had tried to prevent its female employees from flirting with people outside the store, only mentioned "Peppermint" Mary at the end of the piece as an employee who might possibly have caused this and did not answer the question.
The ''New York World'' also famously used a question headline for hedging when editors were unsure of their facts, when it reported the outcome of the
1916 United States presidential election. When other
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
newspapers ran statement headlines on 8 November 1916 saying "Hughes Is Elected" (''
The Evening Sun'', final edition the night before), "Hughes Is Elected by Narrow Margin" (''
The Sun
The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot Plasma (physics), plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as ...
''), "Hughes Is Elected by Majority of 40" (''
The New York Herald''), "Hughes the Next President" (''
The Journal of Commerce
''Journal of Commerce'' is a biweekly magazine published in the United States that focuses on global trade topics. First published in 1827 in New York, it has a circulation of approximately 15,000. It provides editorial content to manage day-to ...
''), "Hughes Sweeps State" (''
New York Tribune
The ''New-York Tribune'' (from 1914: ''New York Tribune'') was an American newspaper founded in 1841 by editor Horace Greeley. It bore the moniker ''New-York Daily Tribune'' from 1842 to 1866 before returning to its original name. From the 1840s ...
'') and "Nation Swept by Hughes!" (''
New York American
:''Includes coverage of New York Journal-American and its predecessors New York Journal, The Journal, New York American and New York Evening Journal''
The ''New York Journal-American'' was a daily newspaper published in New York City from 1937 ...
''), the ''World'' ran one with a question headline, "Hughes Elected in Close Contest?"
This was the result of a last-minute intervention by then ''World'' journalist
Herbert Bayard Swope
Herbert Bayard Swope Sr. (; January 5, 1882 – June 20, 1958) was an American editor, journalist and intimate of the Algonquin Round Table. Swope spent most of his career at the ''New York World.'' He was the first and three-time recipient of t ...
, who, having received a tip from gambling friends that
Charles Evans Hughes
Charles Evans Hughes (April 11, 1862 – August 27, 1948) was an American politician, academic, and jurist who served as the 11th chief justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...
might not in fact win, persuaded Charles M. Lincoln, the managing editor of the paper, to reset the headline in between editions, inserting a question mark. Confusingly, below the question headline the ''World'' still had a picture of Hughes captioned "The
President-Elect
An ''officer-elect'' is a person who has been elected to a position but has not yet been installed. Notably, a president who has been elected but not yet installed would be referred to as a ''president-elect'' (e.g. president-elect of the Un ...
" but the question headline did indeed turn out to have the answer "no", as
President
President most commonly refers to:
*President (corporate title)
* President (education), a leader of a college or university
*President (government title)
President may also refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film and television
*'' Præsident ...
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat to serve as president during the Prog ...
was re-elected, which the ''World'' finally announced in a headline two days later.
Advertisers and marketers prefer yes/no question headlines that are answered "yes", as a reader that immediately answers "no" to a question headline on an advertisement is likely to skip over the advertisement entirely. The most famous example of such a question headline in advertising is "Do you make these mistakes in English?", written to advertise
Sherwin Cody's English-language course and used from 1919 to 1959, which (with readers answering "yes" they did make the mistakes that the advertisement proceeded to outline) was measured as more successful than non-yes/no-question alternatives.
Victor Schwab, a partner in the advertising agency that worked for Cody, published an analysis of the aspects of the headline attempting to look at it scientifically and using ten years' worth of revenue and customer enquiry data for both it and a statement headline that Cody had also used. He noted amongst other things that working in its favour was the question addressing the reader using the
second person. A 2013 study into
computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined as any human communication that occurs through the use of two or more electronic devices. While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated forma ...
came to a similar conclusion, finding that question headlines posted to
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
and
eBay
eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...
increased click-through rates in comparison to statement headlines and that questions that address or reference the reader have statistically significant higher click-through rates than rhetorical or general questions.
Hinchliffe's rule
In the field of
particle physics
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the s ...
, the concept is known as Hinchliffe's rule, after physicist
Ian Hinchliffe, who stated that if a research paper's title is in the form of a yes–no question, the answer to that question will be "no". The adage led into a humorous attempt at a
liar paradox
In philosophy and logic, the classical liar paradox or liar's paradox or antinomy of the liar is the statement of a liar that they are lying: for instance, declaring that "I am lying". If the liar is indeed lying, then the liar is telling the trut ...
by a 1988 paper, written by physicist
Boris Kayser under the pseudonym "Boris Peon", which bore the title: "Is Hinchliffe's Rule True?".
See also
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Headlinese
The headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents.
The large type ''front page headline'' did not come into use until the late 19th century when incre ...
– Strange phrasing of headlines
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References
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Further reading
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External links
Betteridge's website*
{{Media and human factors
2009 introductions
Adages
Criticism of journalism
Paremiology
Skepticism
Eponymous rules