Questions to Which the Answer is "No!" E-Book

John Rentoul

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 111

Beschreibung

John Rentoul has been running the Questions To Which The Answer Is "No!" Awards for several years now. Celebrating the journalistic skill of basing an entire article on a fantastically far-fetched question-based headline (and only admitting that the premise is extraordinarily unlikely in the final paragraph), his blog attracts large numbers of followers keen to submit their own favourites. Here for the first time Rentoul brings together the winning entries over the years. With an introductory essay on the art of headline writing, articles are grouped thematically in subjects from sports to politics, current affairs and history. Featuring such journalistic gems as: - Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens? - Can your dreams predict the future? - Is this penguin a communist? - Has Marilyn Monroe been reincarnated as a shop assistant called Chris? ... and many more, 'Questions To Which The Answer Is "No!"' will leave you not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the state of journalism today.

Leseprobe

QUESTIONS TO WHICH THE ANSWER IS “NO!”

First published 2012 by

Elliott and Thompson Limited

27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX

www.eandtbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-908739-31-5

Text © John Rentoul 2012

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for extracts and images used within this book. Where this has not been possible, the publisher will be happy to credit them in future editions.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Jacket design: kid-ethic.com

Typesetting: Louis Mackay / www.louismackaydesign.co.uk

INTRODUCTION

Why would you write a headline in the form of a question? It might be because you want to set your readers a quiz. What is the capital of Kyrgyzstan? Yes, well, everyone knows the answer to that one. Bishkek. No, I mean, why would you want to ask, in a headline, a question to which the answer is yes or no? Such as, ‘So you think you know your capitals of former Soviet republics?’ Yes. I mean, no. I mean a question such as, ‘Does this book tell us something important about the state of English-language journalism today?’ Or, ‘Is this penguin a Communist?’ Why would someone want to ask that? As an aid to open-minded intellectual inquiry, perhaps. That is how you are supposed to write essays, after all. Set out the question; define the terms; answer the question. Was the Battle of Naseby the turning point in the English Civil War? That sort of thing. It is not, however, the sort of thing that crops up often as a headline in news media.

The sort of question that crops up a lot in headlines in newspapers, and especially in the Daily Mail, is: ‘Did Marlene Dietrich plot to murder Hitler?’ ‘Is the Turin Shroud genuine after all?’ ‘Are aliens getting less camera shy?’ These are not open-minded inquiries in search of the truth in all its complexity. These are suggestions that something newsworthy might have just been discovered. Yet they are phrased as questions. Why? Well, one person who conducted a nine-year research project, studying the Daily Mail and its editor, Paul Dacre, is Dr Alastair Campbell, former consultant to Tony Blair:

The Mail loves unanswered questions ... you know the kind of thing ... Are teenagers having too much sex with their laptops? Are asylum seekers eating our babies? Does too much cellulite threaten the Church of England? Does Tony Blair want to be Pope? Dacre loves question marks because they can be used to insinuate anything that his demented imagination dreams up as he is driven into work.1

It is tempting, therefore, to assume that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. This was the conclusion of Ian Betteridge, a technology blogger, who gave his name to Betteridge’s Law. He wrote: ‘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.’ 2

Indeed, the slogan of one of the Mail’s columnists, Jan Moir, is one of the all-time great Questions to Which the Answer is No: ‘Are you thinking what she’s thinking?’ After all, if the answer were yes, the newspaper could assert the insinuation as fact. ‘She’s thinking what you are thinking’ or ‘Church of England threatened by excess of cellulite’ or ‘Marlene Dietrich plotted to murder Hitler’.

Betteridge’s Law is an attractive hypothesis. Unfortunately, having tested it in laboratory conditions – that is, by reading things in newspapers and on the internet – I have established that it fails to capture the full complexity of modern journalism.

For a more sophisticated analysis of the art of writing headlines, therefore, let us turn to Alan Beattie, International Economy Editor of the Financial Times. He promulgated Beattie’s Immutable Law of Headlines, as follows:

If there’s a question mark in the headline the answer is either (tabloid) ‘no’ or (broadsheet) ‘who cares?’ For example: ‘Is Jackson Widow Serial Killer?’ No.

‘Is Bordeaux the New Provence?’ Who cares? ‘Have The Police Gone Stark Staring Mad?’ No. ‘Do Women Prefer Vladimir Putin’s Body to Jack Nicholson’s?’ Who cares?

Perhaps the finest question in the broadsheet category was one asked by the Wall Street Journal on 24 March 2011: ‘Why have dinner napkins gotten so darn small?’ As Beattie said: ‘The genius of this is that it identified a trend which I haven’t noticed and about which I wouldn’t care if I had.’

Inevitably, further investigation in the laboratory found that even Beattie’s Immutable Law turned out to be, well, mutable. First, a reader pointed out that it was silent on the matter of magazine headlines. Beattie acted swiftly to fill this legislative omission, returning from another trip up the mountain to hand down a Protocol to the original Law:

For women’s magazines, the answer is: ‘Dunno, and your stupid quiz isn’t going to tell me.’ (In response to, for example, Could You Be Co-Dependent? Are You Your Own Best Friend? Is Your Cellulite Abnormal?)

For men’s magazines, the answer is: ‘Dunno, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.’ (In response to, for example, Is The Nokia N8 The Hottest Phone of 2008? Is ‘Four Lions’ Violent Enough? Are You Britain’s Best-Dressed Man? – all genuine headlines from GQ.)

Just as subatomic physicists are always getting close to formulating a single theory that explains everything from quarks to supernovae, without ever quite doing so, the Immutable Law of Headlines, even with its Protocol, still falls short of the elusive ideal. We are close to a unifying theory of headlines in the form of questions, but not quite there.

There is still, for example, the problem of what might be called the ‘double-bluff question’. For example, Laurie Penny of the New Statesman asked on 2 March 2011: ‘Is it crass to compare the protests in London, Cairo and Wisconsin?’ This is an inversion of the Daily Mail technique. Instead of suggesting that the answer to the question is yes when it is no, Penny’s subeditor was suggesting that the answer was no when it was yes. Penny suggested that the common criticism of people, such as she, who drew parallels between the Arab spring and anti-government protests in the west was mistaken. The sub-headline on her article argued, ‘The difference between Tahrir Square and Parliament Square is one of scale, but not of substance.’ I disagree, and say that ‘crass’ is a good description of her view.

There is also, however, the Battle of Naseby kind of question, the earnest dispassionate inquiry where a writer poses a question of genuine public interest and seeks to answer it. Needless to say, these open questions are rare, and indeed, for some reason, the answer to them is usually no, but it can on occasion be yes, and the diligent searcher after truth has to read the thing to find out. This is a form favoured by writers as different as Gavyn Davies, the brilliant economist who was also once chairman of the BBC, and Mike Smithson, the founder of the equally useful Political Betting website. Davies often asks questions such as ‘Can a banking union save the euro?’ in the headline of his posts on his blog – and I assume that he writes the headlines himself, which is usual on blogs if not in newspapers. Asking a question can be a good way of setting out an argument about a technical and difficult subject. Another question he asked himself, around the same time, was: ‘A parallel currency for Greece?’ In both cases, his answer was no. ‘I am inclined to believe that a parallel currency could only work in a parallel universe, not the one we currently inhabit,’ he wrote in answer to his second question. ‘But it would be very nice to be wrong about this.’

Smithson’s headlines, which I assume that he too writes himself, feature in my list in these pages. This is a little unfair, because he generally uses them not to pretend that unlikely things are likely but to provoke debate among his site’s large and well-informed readership. That means that the answer can be yes. Just recently, for example, he asked, ‘Will the new parliamentary boundaries really make that much difference?’ ‘Can George Osborne go on with declining backbench support?’ and ‘Could the Tories split themselves once again over Europe?’ The answers are, of course, yes, yes and yes. But in more cases the answer is no, and sometimes the question looks like an attempt to suggest otherwise. ‘Is Blair back in the frame again for the EU job?’ Smithson asked on the day the European Council met to appoint Herman Van Rompuy to the presidency. And, when the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition announced the tripling of tuition fees, he asked: ‘Will today mark the end of unrealistic election pledges?’

This, then, is the rule for including questions in my series: it is a list of headlines in the form of questions to which the answer is no when the writer or publisher implies that the answer is yes. By writer, I mean the writer of the headline, which in a newspaper, as I have already noted, usually means a sub-editor rather than the named author. I invented several other arbitrary rules, mostly so that I could break them. One was that questions in the Daily Express did not count, as it was not a newspaper. In my defence, this was the period in which the Expressfrequently put confected stories about Madeleine McCann on its front page. However, as I allowed questions from blogs, including some peculiar ones with names such as abovetopsecret. com, I decided that I was being needlessly judgemental. After a while I allowed questions that were not even headlines. Still, it was my series, so I made the rules. But how did it begin?

Once upon a time

My series of Questions to Which the Answer is No started in 2009, with a bishop, a grudge against Marks & Spencer, and a two-page spread in the Daily Mail. I had been inspired by Oliver Kamm, my friend and hero, who wrote about ‘Great Historical Questions to Which the Answer is No’ on his blog. He was one of the pioneers of the web log, and one of the best. I think he first referred to these questions on 17 August 2005. He wrote that a ‘writer of a letter in the Guardian appears to be bidding for a place in the series “Great Historical Questions to which the Answer is No”’, by asking: “Henry Kissinger – isn’t he the bloke responsible for the 9/11 atrocity?”’

The letter-writer’s reasoning was not direct, but it was still wrong. He suggested that 9/11 was a reaction to American foreign policy over decades, including ‘the US-inspired military coup that killed off the democratically elected government of Chile and installed the murderous Pinochet dictatorship’. Kamm responded:

I have no sympathy for the atrocious Pinochet regime, hold to very different foreign-policy premises from Henry Kissinger, and find much to criticise in his record as Secretary of State. But these questions have no bearing on the myth that Kissinger was ‘the bloke responsible’ for the coup in Chile. No one has ever been able to demonstrate this, for the simple reason that it isn’t true.

This came as a surprise to me, because the 1973 coup in Chile was one of my earliest political experiences. Around my fifteenth birthday I was so animated by the wickedness of the US in interfering to bring down the elected socialist president Salvador Allende that I went to my first protest meeting. However, Kamm is undoubtedly right and I was wrong.

Another Great Historical Question, with the same answer, was pilloried by Kamm when Peter Hitchens asked in the Mail on Sunday in July 2008 about the causes of bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia: ‘Could it have been connected with the ruthless economic liberalisation forced on it by dogmatic Westerners at the end of the Cold War?’ Kamm dealt with such nonsense briskly, wondering if Hitchens had heard of Slobodan Milosevic.

Kamm’s example must have been in my mind when I came across this long sub-headline in the Daily Mail on 6 February 2009:

He’s the outcast bishop who denies the Holocaust – yet has been welcomed back by the Pope. But are Bishop Williamson’s repugnant views the result of a festering grudge against Marks & Spencer?

Such was my youthful arrogance that – I can admit this now – I did not read the story at the time. I knew that I did not need to. Luckily, I was right. Three years later, I can confirm that it quoted Edna Andrews, the family’s housekeeper, who said that Bishop Williamson’s mother thought that his father, a hosiery buyer, had been denied promotion at Marks & Spencer because he was not Jewish.

My blog post described it as ‘Number 91 in an occasional series of headlines in the form of a question to which the answer is no’. This was not strictly true, or even true at all. I started at 91