Betteridge's law of headlines

From St. John:

 Something to keep in mind as election coverage becomes more frenzied!

Betteridge's law of headlines:

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

Source from the Wiki article (note this is old news, look at the date):

February 23, 2009

TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism by Ian Betteridge

The TechCrunch/Last.fm controversy has been all over the net over the weekend, and there’s not much that I can add to it factually. The one thing I will say, though, is that TechCrunch has behaved irresponsible: not so much for the original story - everyone gets it wrong sometimes. But when you get it wildly wrong like this, what you don’t do is use weasal words to try and cover up the fact that you’ve got it horribly wrong. For example:

“From the very beginning, I’ve presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.”

In a word, this is bullshit. It’s Daily Mail-style journalism, posing a statement as just “asking questions”. And even when Schonfeld got a detailed statement from Last.fm on exactly what data it gives to record companies (answer: no more than they could get just by looking it up on the public Last.fm site), he doesn’t retract the story.

TechCrunch got it wrong, and instead of retracting the story and apologising, it’s trying to wriggle out and say “it’s only a rumour”. Sorry, but that’s bullshit. And please, please, I hope no one brings up that old chestnut of “it’s only a blog, we don’t have to adopt proper standards for reporting”. The moment you can have a serious effect on a company or individual, you owe it to the world to be sure of what you say.

One thing though: 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. Which, of course, is why it’s so common in the Daily Mail.

The only bit I would argue about is that you won't know if your post will have a serious effect until you post it. If you are running a no-bit blog like mine you might think you are having no effect on the world. Websites that are getting a zillion hits a day probably should be a little more careful, but that isn't what gets you the hits, is it? 

On the other hand I will post something and then days or weeks or months later I will notice other people saying the same thing, so maybe I am having some influence (dream on chuck-a-geddon). More likely clear thinking people eventually arrive at the same conclusion and I just hadn't noticed anyone else saying the same thing until after I said my piece.