Who are these experts you’re talking about?

This headline on ScienceDaily caught my eye this morning:

Patients Shouldn’t Navigate Internet Without Physician Guide, Experts Say

I’ve already written and deleted half a dozen smarmy comments. Feel free to insert your own. Some of the headlines I’ve written looked equally dumb once they were published, so I’m not going to throw stones from this glass house. But let’s look at that attribution: Experts say.

A search of Goggle news this morning reveals that within the past week, “experts” were mentioned in 122,943 stories. So we might ask: Who are these “experts,” and how did they get to be that way?

Here are a few of the stories:

Frank Jordans of the AP: Outside experts to review WHO’s swine flu response.

The staff of CTV news in Canada: Gonorrhea risks becoming a superbug, expert warns.

Mike Lillis of The Washington Independent: Medical Experts Highlight Chief Flaw of Dems’ Health Reforms.

Jim Steinberg of the Contra Costa Times: Experts: Health system can handle new insured.

William March of The Tampa Tribune: Experts differ on merits, political impact of McCollum’s health care lawsuit.

From Melly Alazraki of AOL’s DailyFinance.com: Breast Cancer Screening: Why Can’t Experts Agree?

Good question, Melly: Why can’t they agree? If experts are people who really know something, shouldn’t what they know be beyond disagreement?

The experts in the ScienceDaily story (“adapted” from a press release) are Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman, both doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The story is based on an article they published in the New England Journal of Medicine. They write that the Internet is unique because “previous technologies have been fully under the doctor’s control,” but “the Internet is equally in the hands of patients.”

The story doesn’t say what Groopman (a familiar name to many of us) and Hartzband specialize in. Let’s grant that they have expertise in some area of medicine. What makes them experts on the Internet?

We don’t know. The ScienceDaily story doesn’t say so. Neither does the New England Journal article.

I’m going to go out on a limb: I don’t think they are Internet experts. I come to that conclusion because I am not an expert on the Internet, and I already knew most of what I read in their piece. If I know most of what they know, and I’m not an expert, I’ll make the leap that they aren’t either.

I’m belaboring the point. In science stories, “expert” should be a word like “breakthrough”–as rarely seen as a Perigord truffle. Describe the people you quote in a way that tells the reader something. Save the meaningless “expert” for when you really need it. And you might find out that you never really need it at all.

– Paul Raeburn

Grist: Beth Israel press release.