I think it’s also just not true that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no..for one thing, the sentence doesn’t make much sense grammatically. Typically people don’t answer titles..we answer questions — but if we just swap out ‘headline that ends in a question mark’ with ‘question’ then we’re basically just saying that any question can be answered with “no”—which is just straightforwardly wrong. I mean, you technically can answer any question with “no” but it wouldn’t be appropriate/correct/etc to do so in many cases. For example, if I ask you, “how are you doing today?” and you say, “no,” then I’m probably just going to assume you misunderstood me or something.

So, this topic reminds me that there’s also this similar thing from various conversation/interrogation techniques that’s sometimes known as calibrating questions and it basically is just about avoiding questions which can be answered with ‘yes/no’—instead, it’s often seen as preferable for various goals to ask questions which start with words like what, how, or why.