No.
Wikipedia: Betteridge’s law of headlines
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.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?” (Schonfeld 2009):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 bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
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:
If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’. Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.
Believe it or not, I walk around with this
All studies in the linked Wikipedia article (under the topic “Studies”) show that the answer is more often yes than no.
The point of Betteridge’s law isn’t really that they’re false, it’s that the editor hasn’t got the evidence that it’s true because if they did it wouldn’t be a question.
In this case it’s a hard no. The main threat to Labour isn’t the greens it’s people thinking it’s a forgone conclusion and not voting, the new constituencies that reduce the number of city seats because poor people register to vote less than others, which reduces the number of Labour MPs, voter disenfranchisement, the Conservative Party election machine which will narrow the polls as we go through the weeks and biased coverage from the print and broadcast media.
Last night a BBC report on the election has several minutes covering Rishi’s “energetic” election campaign with plenty of clips of him claiming to like talking to people, then a single soundbite from each of Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Reform followed by a still of Keir Starmer with a voice over saying he was campaigning too and then a one minute segment on controversy once Diane Abbot. The message was “Rishi is working hard to meet lots of ordinary people, here’s some quotes for balance, and Labour are divided.” I think the Conservatives are far more divided and that Labour will work far harder for ordinary people, but I’m not a conservative donor who’s been appointed to make editorial decisions about BBC politics, so what would I know?
The politics part is a bit too deep for me as a non-UK resident, but thanks for the elaboration in your first paragraph, that sounds plausible.
