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. 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 questions.
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. It has also been referred to as the "journalistic principle" and in 2007 was referred to in commentary as "an old truism 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 article that carried the headline "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?" :
A 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:
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, 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 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 (all percentages rounded by Linander).
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 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 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.
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 worked at the Daily Mail after the First World War, 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 has a long history, including the 9 June 1883, headline in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, "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.