Questions to Which the Answer is No! Read online

  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.

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

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  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 abo
ut 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 Express frequently 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 to give the false impression that the series had been running for some time. To add to the pretence, I suggested that the series had been going for at least five years: ‘Prize exhibit of the genre’, I said, remains the Independent’s front page headline, on 29 January 2004, on the publication of the Hutton Report on the death of David Kelly: ‘Whitewash?’

  I will not go into that debate here, except to note that Simon Kelner, the editor of the Independent at the time, told me later that he wished that he had not put a question mark on the headline. He says that, had the report been published a few weeks later, he probably would have left it out, as the Independent was moving towards more opinionated front pages – those of a viewspaper not a newspaper, as Tony Blair put it. As it was, the question mark hardly made a difference to how people recalled the coverage of the Hutton report. If my series demonstrates anything, it shows that asking a question is often interpreted as an assertion that the answer is yes. Blair himself wrote in his memoir: ‘“WHITEWASH” screamed the Daily Mail headline the next day.’3 The Daily Mail front-page headline was actually: ‘Justice?’ (One of the smaller number of questions in that newspaper to which the answer really was yes.) The Mail used the word ‘whitewash’ only in its page four report, which said mildly: ‘The Government’s critics were describing the report as a whitewash.’ Which, thanks to the Independent, question mark or no question mark, was true.

  This was not the only time that the former Prime Minister featured in the invented history of my series. On 24 June 1998, Trevor Kavanagh, the political editor of the Sun, asked: ‘Is this the most dangerous man in Britain?’ His question referred to a picture of Blair, on account of his ambition to persuade Britain to adopt the euro. It was an odd question, because the euro could have been adopted only after a referendum – an instrument much demanded by Eurosceptics – which was why it never seemed likely that it would happen. Indeed it was a tribute to Blair’s persuasive power that the Sun was so fearful of him.

  Later, I noted other examples that pre-dated the actual series. Nicholas Carr, in the July–August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, asked: ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ This is a persistent question, asked in sundry variations that suggest that, far from opening up limitless possibilities, technological progress is dumbing us down. I passionately disagree. A similar question that often recurs is ‘Will robots replace human journalists?’ I passionately believe that the answer to that question is no, too.

  Imagine my delight, also, when I discovered that the title of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay had a question mark at the end of it: ‘The End of History?’ It is often assumed that Fukuyama had said that history was at an end. Instead, he was up to the same game as the Daily Mail, of using a question as a way of implying something without actually asserting it. Mind you, in this case it was understandable that people might have thought that he had stated the end of history as a f
act, because they confused him with Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman. They said, in 1066 And All That, published in 1930, that, as a result of the Great War, ‘America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a .’ They then set a test paper called ‘Up to the End of History’, which includes such gems as:

  4. ‘An Army marches on its stomach’ (Napoleon). Illustrate and examine.

  5. Account (loudly) for the success of Marshal Ney as a leader of horse ...

  9. Comment Quietly on (a) Tariff Reform. (b) Mafeking Night. (c) The Western Front ...

  12. What price Glory?

  Mind you, they were just as wrong about the end of History as Professor Fukuyama was.

  The second T is silent

  Thus was an internet meme born. Or, rather, stolen. I may have put ‘meme’ on the Banned List,4 but on this occasion it is the correct word. A self-replicating idea. I thought I was just joking around on the Independent blog, amusing myself mostly. I came across other Questions to Which the Answer is No and commented on them. ‘Can we use Twitter to break the political-nerd ghetto?’ ‘Is Gordon Brown insane?’ ‘Is this cat really psychic?’ Many of them were from the Daily Mail, but by no means all. Then readers started to send in their own suggestions. Many of these came from Oliver Kamm, but by no means all. The series gained a life of its own. I am not, as you might have guessed, an avid reader of the Daily Mail, except for the purposes of knowing the enemy, but other people became proficient at spotting its headlines for me to include in the series. Having started as a thief, I became a curator. I just had to wait for the suggestions to come in, number them and list them on the Independent blog.

  When Twitter became more popular, I needed a shorter name for the series, because ‘Questions to Which the Answer is No’ is 35 characters already, so I started to use the hashtag #QTWTAIN. I had once referred to it as QWAN on the blog, which would have made more sense, but which lacked the essential silliness that was required. So QTWTAIN it was, pronounced kuh-twain. The second T is silent. Some people, like those George Bernard Shaw simplified spelling cranks, write it QTWAIN, but that is wrong.