this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
8 points (100.0% liked)
U.S. News
2244 readers
16 users here now
News about and pertaining to the United States and its people.
Please read what's functionally the mission statement before posting for the first time. We have a narrower definition of news than you might be accustomed to.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Post the original source of information as the link.
- If there is a paywall, provide an archive link in the body.
- Post using the original headline; edits for clarity (as in providing crucial info a clickbait hed omits) are fine.
- Social media is not a news source.
For World News, see the News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm quite familiar with Betteridge. Strict adherence gets to your question; the larger issue, as with anything, is that so many question heds have been posed where the answer is "no" that it became a "law."
In journalism, there are problems that showed up far earlier than clickbait question heds, such as garden-path or irrelevant ledes. I've written and run question heds that were correct display copy atop stories in which the reporter tried to find an answer but couldn't given conflicting information from sources. At that point, the correct approach is a question.
Question heds atop stories that definitively disprove the question are lazy at best and disingenuous at worst. But to categorically remove a form of hed writing as valid based on statistics or anecdotal data isn't an improvement.