Today I learned about Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: the rule that posits “If a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is ‘no’.” This law is named after British journalist Ian Betteridge who mentioned it in 2009, though the principle itself has long been in existence. The gist is that if the publisher was confident about a positive answer, they would have phrased it as a statement rather than a question. By framing it as a question, they dodge the responsibility for its accuracy. This sets up automatic expectations for the reader based on the article’s headline, functioning as positive feedback, and headlines are now phrased in this manner not because there’s some psychological explanation, but because it has become customary that a question in the headline implies an unconventional “yes” answer.
I hope I’ve saved you time on reading pre-election articles.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 