Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T23:57:41.335Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Should we regard question-based media headlines as clickbait?

A discussion of Betteridge's Law and related issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2021

Brian Poole
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In an article published a little over a decade ago (Betteridge, 2009), the journalist Ian Betteridge offered some scathing comments about a piece published a few days earlier in TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld (Schonfeld, 2009). Amongst other things, Betteridge suggested that the headline concerned (‘Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?’) was ‘a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no”.’ Readers of English Today will realise immediately that this ‘maxim’ cannot possibly be watertight as expressed by Betteridge, since only polar questions can be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, WH-questions (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973: 196) such as ‘Who opened my letter?’ and ‘How long have you been waiting?’ obviously cannot be responded to in any sensible way with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Furthermore, it is not difficult to find media headlines taking the form of non-polar questions: for example, “What would a no-deal Brexit mean for business?” (O'Dwyer et.al., 2020).

Type
Shorter Article
Information
English Today , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 41 - 46
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Betteridge, I. 2009. ‘TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism.’ Technovia.com. Online at https://web.archive.org/web/20090226202006/http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/02/techcrunch-irresponsible-journalism.html (Accessed January 8, 2021).Google Scholar
Blitz, M. 2019. ‘Could Bigfoot really be out there?’ Popular Mechanics. Online at https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a23622082/bigfoot-history/ (Accessed January 13, 2021).Google Scholar
Collins English Dictionary. 1983. Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.Google Scholar
Cook, J. & Plourde, D. 2016. ‘Do scholars follow Betteridge's Law? The use of questions in journal article titles.’ Scientometrics, 108, 1119–1128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cresswell, J. 2007. The Cat's Pyjamas: The Penguin Book of Clichés. UK: Penguin.Google Scholar
Daily Mail Archive. Online at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/sitemaparchive/index.html (Accessed January 3, 2021).Google Scholar
Loewenstein, G. 1994. ‘The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation.’ Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mormol, P. 2019. ‘I urge you to see this. Clickbait as one of the dominant features of contemporary online headlines.’ Social Communication, 5(2), 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, B. 2020. ‘Is Queen Elizabeth an extra-terrestrial reptile?’ Online at https://www.news24.com/channel/gossip/royal-news/is-queen-elizabeth-an-extraterrestrial-reptile-some-of-the-most-bizarre-royal-conspiracy-theories-20200615 (Accessed January 25, 2021).Google Scholar
Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Komlossy, K., Schuster, S., Wiegmann, M., Garces Fernandez, E., Hagen, M. & Stein, B. 2018. ‘Crowdsourcing a large corpus of clickbait on Twitter.’ In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018), 1498–1507.Google Scholar
O'Dwyer, M., Onita, L., Gill, O., Foy, S., Hunt, M. & Millard, R. 2020. ‘What would a no-deal Brexit mean for business?’ Daily Telegraph, December 14. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/12/11/would-no-deal-brexit-mean-business/ (Accessed January 19, 2021).Google Scholar
Quirk, R. & Greenbaum, S. 1973. A University Grammar of English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Schonfeld, E. 2009. ‘Did Last.fm just hand over user listening data to the RIAA?’ TechCrunch, February 21. Online at https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-listening-data-to-the-riaa/ (Accessed January 3, 2021).Google Scholar
Sykes, B., Mullis, R., Hagenmuller, C., Melton, T. & Sartori, M. 2014. ‘Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates.’ Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 281: 20140161. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.0161Google ScholarPubMed