It is 3:40 in the afternoon and a general-assignment reporter at a regional television affiliate has ninety minutes before her segment needs a soundbite. A new study just dropped about a common medication interaction, the kind of story that will run in the six o'clock health segment tonight whether or not she finds anyone credible to explain it.
She does not have a specialist rolodex. She has never covered this exact drug class before. Her first call goes to the university medical center's press office, twenty minutes away, which offers her a media-trained faculty member whose actual clinical focus is adjacent to the story but close enough to sound authoritative on camera. Her second call, sent as a blast through a source-request platform, pulls back three responses in the next half hour: two physicians she has never verified, and one who replied within four minutes because he replies to every request that platform sends, on any topic, regardless of fit.
She books the fastest, cleanest response. It is 4:50. She has a segment to file.
Nowhere in that ninety minutes did anyone check whether the community internist a mile from the TV station, who has managed this exact interaction in patients for a decade and would have given a more grounded, more accurate answer, was even findable. The public will hear from whichever clinician answered the email, and nothing in the system was built to ask whether that clinician was the one who actually knew.
The trust being spent, and what it is being spent on
Start with why this matters more than it looks like it should.
93% of US adults report a great deal or fair amount of trust in their own doctor's health recommendations, the highest trust rating of any health information source measured. That trust is the scarcest, most valuable asset in health communication, and every time a clinician appears on the news or in a health story, some of that trust transfers to whatever they say, regardless of whether they were the right person to say it.
Set against that trust: 96% of US adults have heard at least one of ten specific pieces of health misinformation. The gap between how much the public trusts clinicians and how much misinformation reaches them anyway is not primarily a story about bad actors spreading lies. It is a story about a selection process for who gets quoted that has nothing to do with who actually knows the answer, running at scale, every single day, across thousands of newsrooms with no verification layer at all.
The one national tool that tried to solve this simply broke
For years, journalists on deadline had a single crowdsourced workaround: HARO, "Help a Reporter Out," which claimed over 800,000 sources and 55,000 journalists and bloggers at its peak. It let a reporter blast a request and collect whoever responded, no verification of credentials, no check on whether a respondent's expertise matched the question, just speed.
On November 8, 2024, Cision announced the service, by then rebranded Connectively, would be discontinued effective December 9, 2024. Then, on April 15, 2025, Cision sold HARO to Featured.com, which revived it the very next day.
Sit with that timeline. The single most-used national tool for connecting journalists to sources blinked completely out of existence, for a working newsroom, and came back under new ownership within five months. And at no point in that cycle, discontinuation, sale, or revival, did anyone add a verification layer. The tool that came back is functionally the same tool that died: fast, unverified, and selecting for whoever happens to be scrolling their inbox at the right moment.
That is not a story about one platform's business decision. It is a demonstration of how thin the entire infrastructure is. The demand for source-finding is clearly enormous, enormous enough that a dead product got resurrected within months by a new buyer. And the fix nobody built, even after the gap was made completely visible, was verification.
The accountability layer that does not exist either
Here is the part of the failure that should be more alarming than it currently is. If a clinician says something wrong, or misleading, or simply outside their actual expertise, in a press interview, what happens to them professionally?
Almost nothing.
Across 3,128 medical board disciplinary proceedings in the five most populous US states, only 6, or 0.1%, involved spreading misinformation to the community. Compare that to 28.7% of the same proceedings involving negligence. Medical boards, the bodies with actual regulatory teeth over clinical practice, essentially do not police public medical speech at all. And where they have acted, sanctions "tended to be relatively light."
This matters because it means the credential a journalist is implicitly trusting when she quotes a physician (a valid medical license) carries almost no enforcement behind the specific act of speaking to the public. A confident, well-followed physician commenting on a topic outside their specialty faces essentially the same regulatory exposure as one staying carefully within their expertise: none.
The scale of what this has already produced is documented. COVID-19 misinformation was traced to 52 US physicians across 28 specialties and every region of the country; 80.8% posted vaccine misinformation, and 38.5% posted across five or more platforms. These were licensed physicians, not anonymous accounts, operating with functionally no accountability mechanism attached to their public medical speech.
Why the substitutes journalists actually use do not solve it
SciLine, run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and funded by philanthropies, is the most serious existing attempt at a fix. It provides free one-on-one interview matching and expert quotes for journalists, with explicit emphasis on serving local and general-assignment reporters who lack a specialist rolodex. It is a genuinely good service, and its existence is itself evidence that the market fails without it: nobody would fund a philanthropic matching service for a problem the market was already solving.
But SciLine covers science broadly, not medicine specifically, is not clinician-owned, and offers no peer attestation of whether a given expert's view is mainstream or an outlier within their own specialty, and no automatic disclosure of financial relationships. It solves reach. It does not solve verification or representativeness.
Institutional press offices, the default first call for most reporters, exist to promote their own institution, which is a fundamentally different incentive than surfacing the best-qualified expert regardless of employer. And the institutional channel is itself a documented weak filter: a 2009 Annals of Internal Medicine analysis of 200 academic medical center press releases (issued at a mean rate of 49 releases a year per center) found 40% covered the most limited kind of human study, uncontrolled, fewer than 30 participants, surrogate outcomes, or not yet published, and 58% of those releases lacked the relevant cautions a reader would need to interpret the finding correctly. The channel journalists default to when they have no other option is, on the evidence, not a reliable filter for scientific quality either.
Source-request platforms like the revived HARO monetize the PR side of the transaction; their paying customers are the marketers and publicists submitting requests, not the journalists receiving responses, which means their supply of sources skews toward whoever is optimizing for visibility rather than whoever actually knows the answer.
The structural failure: nobody can verify anybody in twenty minutes
Here is the mechanism underneath all of this. A reporter on deadline cannot check licensure, specialty, and practice currency in the time she has. She has no way to know whether a confident, well-followed physician represents mainstream clinical opinion in their field or a fringe outlier. And the profession itself supplies essentially no accountability signal to close that gap, since medical boards almost never act on public medical speech regardless of how misleading it is.
Meanwhile, the parties who do hold real information sit in silos that cannot help her. Institutional press offices hold availability data, but only for their own faculty, and their incentive is promotion, not accuracy. Doximity holds verified physician identity at scale, but has built no responsiveness or availability layer on top of it, because its business model runs on pharma reach to physicians, not journalist-facing source discovery. Social platforms hold reach, which multiple studies in this piece show is the signal least correlated with actual expertise.
There is a further asymmetry worth naming directly, because it shows up in whose voice ends up in the story at all. Across two years of New York Times vaccine coverage, 1,978 articles quoted 3,555 expert sources, of whom 2,417 were male and 1,138 female, a pattern that held specifically among researchers and medical experts. Source selection under deadline pressure is not just missing the right specialty. It is reproducing whatever bias already exists in who is easiest, fastest, and most familiar to reach.
What would actually work
A verified, availability-aware index, not another crowdsourced blast list. Who is qualified on this specific clinical question, who is free in the next two hours, and who has already consented to be quoted, searchable by clinical specificity rather than general specialty.
A peer attestation layer indicating mainstream versus minority opinion. This is the piece no existing tool has. A reporter needs to know not just that a clinician is licensed and willing, but whether their view on this particular question reflects where their field actually stands.
Automatic conflict disclosure attached to every response, not self-reported after the fact. A verified ledger of financial relationships that surfaces to the journalist at the moment of the request, before the quote runs, rather than something a fact-checker has to reconstruct afterward.
A response-time guarantee that makes the tool usable on an actual newsroom deadline. A directory with no expectation of a fast reply will not be used by a reporter with ninety minutes, no matter how good its verification is.
An explicit editorial-ethics stance: members speak as clinicians, not as spokespeople for an employer or a company. This has to be a structural commitment, not a values statement, because the moment the party running the index is also selling placement, the whole verification premise collapses.
Credit and record-keeping for the clinician, not just the journalist. A clinician who is quoted accurately, on a question genuinely inside their expertise, should have that logged as part of a public professional record, creating a real incentive to participate that goes beyond altruism.
What you can do now
If you are a clinician willing to speak to the press
Say so explicitly, somewhere findable. Almost no community clinician advertises willingness to talk to journalists, which means the only physicians reporters can find quickly are the ones already doing active self-promotion, a selection effect that has nothing to do with who actually knows the most.
Stay inside your actual expertise, and say so out loud on the call. "That's slightly outside what I treat directly, but here's what I can tell you" is more useful to a reporter, and to the public, than a confident answer stretched past its real basis.
Disclose any financial relationship relevant to the topic before you are asked. Given how rarely medical boards act on public medical speech, self-policing on disclosure is currently the only real accountability mechanism most quoted clinicians are subject to.
If you are a journalist
Ask directly whether the source you are about to quote currently sees patients for this condition. The Annals of Internal Medicine finding on weak institutional press releases and the JAMA finding on undisclosed social-media endorsements both point the same direction: proximity to an institution's PR machine is not evidence of relevant expertise.
Treat a fast reply as a red flag worth a follow-up question, not a convenience to book immediately. The clinician who always replies within minutes to any source request is frequently optimizing for visibility, not necessarily withholding relevant knowledge, but it is worth knowing which one you have.
Cross-check any physician you quote regularly against CMS Open Payments before the relationship becomes routine. It takes minutes and closes exactly the kind of undisclosed-conflict gap the JAMA endorsement study documented.
If you run institutional or health-system communications
Recognize the conflict of interest in your own default role. Offering your own faculty first is a reasonable business instinct and a structural bias at the same time; naming that tension internally is the first step to correcting for it.
Build a referral habit to outside experts when your own faculty is not the best fit. It costs your institution nothing and materially improves the accuracy of coverage your organization will eventually be judged against.
Frequently asked questions
How do journalists find medical experts on deadline? Mostly through institutional press offices, prior source relationships, and source-request platforms like the revived HARO, none of which verify whether a respondent's specific expertise matches the story. SciLine, run by AAAS and funded by philanthropies, is the most serious free alternative but covers science broadly and does not offer peer attestation of mainstream versus outlier opinion.
Is HARO still running, and what replaced it? HARO (rebranded Connectively under Cision) was discontinued effective December 9, 2024, then sold to Featured.com on April 15, 2025 and revived the following day. It claimed over 800,000 sources and 55,000 journalists at its peak, and its five-month disappearance and quick revival demonstrated strong demand with no verification layer added on return.
How can a physician become a media source for journalists? There is no standardized, verified pathway; most quoted clinicians reach journalists through institutional press offices, personal branding and social-media visibility, or existing relationships with specific reporters. This selects for self-promotion and institutional proximity rather than direct clinical relevance to a given story.
How do you verify a doctor quoted in a news article? Currently, mostly by checking their institutional affiliation and prior media appearances, since no searchable, verified, availability-aware clinician index exists for journalists. Cross-checking a quoted physician's name against CMS Open Payments data can surface undisclosed financial relationships relevant to a story.
Who regulates doctors who spread medical misinformation? State medical boards have that authority in principle but rarely use it: across 3,128 medical board disciplinary proceedings in the five most populous US states, only 6 (0.1%) involved spreading misinformation to the community, compared with 28.7% for negligence, and sanctions in those cases tended to be relatively light (JAMA Network Open, 2024).
Why do quoted medical experts skew toward academic and male sources? Institutional press offices default to promoting their own faculty, who are disproportionately academic, and existing source-request tools favor whoever responds fastest rather than whoever is most relevant. A study of two years of New York Times vaccine coverage found 3,555 quoted expert sources split 2,417 male to 1,138 female, a pattern holding specifically among researchers and medical experts, consistent with a selection process built around speed and existing relationships rather than deliberate expertise matching.
The bottom line
The reporter filing her six o'clock segment was not being careless. She had ninety minutes, a press office twenty minutes away, and a source-request platform that produced three replies in half an hour. Every part of her workflow performed exactly as designed. The design simply never included a way to check whether the fastest, closest, most confident respondent was also the one who actually knew the answer.
That gap sits underneath a genuinely large amount of what the public understands, or misunderstands, about its own health. Ninety-three percent of Americans trust their own doctor more than any other health information source, and that trust gets spent, story by story, on whichever clinician happened to be available and willing on a given afternoon. Ninety-six percent of adults have already absorbed at least one specific piece of health misinformation. The connective tissue between those two numbers is a selection process with no verification, no representativeness check, and, on the evidence of 3,128 disciplinary proceedings, almost no accountability at all for getting it wrong in public.
The single national tool built to solve source-finding at scale died in December 2024 and came back in April 2025 exactly as unverified as it left. That is not a market that solved the problem and moved on. It is a market that proved the demand and then rebuilt the same gap.
Somewhere within a few miles of every regional newsroom in the country is a clinician who actually knows the answer to today's health story, has never given an interview, and has no idea a reporter spent her afternoon looking for exactly her.
Part of a series on the missing professional infrastructure of healthcare. Previously: Medical Affairs Is Buying Reach, Not Judgment
Evidence note: trust and misinformation-exposure figures are from the KFF Health Misinformation Tracking Poll, 2023. The HARO/Connectively discontinuation and revival timeline is drawn from Cision's own public announcements as summarized on Wikipedia; the underlying company statements were not independently re-verified in this piece. The medical board disciplinary proceeding figures (3,128 proceedings, 0.1% misinformation-related) are from a 2024 JAMA Network Open study covering the five most populous US states, not a national sample. The 52-physician COVID misinformation figure is from a 2023 JAMA Network Open study and represents identified cases, not a prevalence estimate of the full physician population. The academic press release quality finding (40% covering weak evidence, 58% of those lacking cautions) is from a 2009 Annals of Internal Medicine study; institutional communications practices may have changed since, though the underlying incentive structure has not. The New York Times vaccine-coverage source gender breakdown is from a 2023 Public Understanding of Science study covering a specific two-year window and outlet, not journalism broadly. SciLine's funding, scope and volume are as described on its own site. Nothing in this article constitutes guidance on how to evaluate any specific medical claim in the news.
