Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no

Journalistic adage on questions in headlines 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.[2] 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. 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 variants called it "Davis's law", a name that also appears online without any explanation of who D ... Read full article.