Can Any Headline That Ends in a Question Mark Be Answered by the Word “No”? Nicoló Follow Apr 12 · 3 min read

Photo by Flipboard on Unsplash and remixed by the author

Betteridge’s law of headlines famously claims that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “No”. This “law” is, of course, not really a law because creating a counter-example is trivial; but should rather be seen as a tongue-in-cheek remark on how low-quality journalism sometimes hides behind dubious and click-baiting headlines.

This phenomenon was first posited by Ian Betteridge, a technology journalist from the UK, in a blog post in 2009 where he specifically wrote:

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 bulls**t, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

To honour Betteridge’s Law, a funny website has been set up under the domain “betteridgeslaw.com” to sift through all the news of the day and point out every instance of Betteridge’s Law in many of the world’s major publications.

betteridgeslaw.com Screenshot

However, perhaps the most amusing part of the whole conjecture is that when you ask yourself, “Is Betteridge’s law of headlines correct?” the answer is statistically “Yes” more often than it is “No”.

Mats Linander, an internet statistician, performed an in-depth analysis of 13 different news websites with 26,000 articles (i.e. 2000 per site).

He then narrowed the data-set down to all the articles which ended with a question mark, read every single one, and categorised each headline with its corresponding answer; Yes, No, Maybe for unclear or contested answers or Non-Polar for questions with non-binary answers. Interested readers can check out the raw data set for a closer look at all the titles used in this analysis and the conclusion reached.

After all of this analysis, Linander’s final conclusion on the matter was the following:

We’re going to go out on a limb here and guesstimate that the remaining “maybe” answers can, given enough time and effort, be turned into “yes” or “no” answers, and that these will be distributed similarly to the 20:17 ratio of the fully answered headlines. That would put the total ratio of “no” at 25%. In other words, it appears as if roughly a quarter of all headlines which end in a question mark can be answered by the word no. You can go ahead and call that Linander’s law of headlines, if you will.

This is a funny conclusion because like the headline of this very story, the answer is ultimately No. Whilst it is amusing to consider this “law”, it is by no means a real law. Perhaps it is just a nice way to tell the good journalism from the bad in a world filled with fake news.

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