Apparently reporters found her through some services that connect experts with reporters and I’m guessing the reporters trusted that service.

Agreed Charlie, but not the way you meant it. The unscrupulous bunch here is lazy journos using UberEats for quotes rather than actually finding and speaking to an expert.

I wouldn't be surprised to find them using third parties to write their articles or find subject ideas too.

Isn't this the s/w version of "guns don't kill people, people kill people"?

> She does not appear to have social media profiles, though she has two followers on the blogging site Medium.

Talk about damning with faint praise!

I suspect this type of thing is absolutely rife, because it can happen in any system where participants don't all have end-to-end visibility of each other. The main force against it is the threat of reputational damage, which usually prompts some level of red tape, but no one likes red tape.

The UK media has a long history of doing this, it turned up to Andrew Wakefield's house and saw his lab in a shed and said "yep this is a reliable doctor and we should tell everyone MMR causes autism", the fall out of which we are still suffering from all over the globe. It was fraud and the media knew it.

It appears as they could not verify if she was in Oxford at all. If there is no way to check that then anyone could pretend. I would not be surprised if anyone was just relying on the choice of words Santini used when communicating, appearing as overly educated in the British system.

Performing background checks is not difficult. Professional background check services are fast and commonly used in hiring processes. It seems like this article is (deliberately?) missing the actual questions raised by this case: why are these various outlets/journalists so lacking in rigor when it comes to the accuracy of their content, and how is a fraudulent expert consistently being chosen for their articles.

It really is up to the journalist to verify their sources.

It’s really common for corporate marketing departments to write copy wholesale, so their corporate glossary gets pumped.

Many of those media outlets are known for being low quality, with the exception possibly of the Telegraph.

I feel like readers should be able to think critically about their news sources, and expect and discount low quality content from tabloids, rather than blindly believing everything that's fed to them, either by gatekeepers in the traditional media, or on social media.