I'd just like to invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

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

It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

I'd just like to invoke the principle to "not judge a book by its cover".

The article here is very well written and does a great job of conveying the perspectives and opinions of many parties. I would recommend reading the article in spite of its headline.

I am invoking Meta-Betteridge's Law:

"any comment that dismisses an article based on it's headline has no value"

For large publications like the New Yorker, it is an Editor, NOT THE AUTHOR who writes a headline.

In this case Betteridge's Law is wrong. The article (quite convincingly) argues "yes."

I would suggest that when there's a possible crime, as there would be in this case, even a clearly guilty murderer caught red-handed holding a knife and screaming "I DID IT" will be an "alleged" perpetrator.

The article clearly lays out that the answer is yes. It points to specific ways the researcher adjusted their reporting to mislead readers. I think the key here is where Koren attempts to specifically account for the stomach content explanation: he misrepresents the lab results and claimed they showed the opposite of what they did.

It's a rhetorical device.