Not telling us everything

Newsroom reports:

A US obstetrician-gynaecologist has cast serious doubt on a high-profile child abuse conviction, asserting the main injuries sustained by the baby were the result of trauma suffered during labour and delivery, not parental abuse. …

Dr Barry Schifrin, a specialist in maternal fetal medicine based in California, criticised the Starship child protection team, Te Puaruruhau, for its lack of an obstetrical review of the case before it diagnosed non-accidental injury, and describes the official version of the baby’s birth presented in court by Starship Hospital doctors as a “fiction”. …

Schifrin is an expert at reading fetal trace monitoring and was part of the team that invented the foetal heart rate monitor in the 1960s, which was developed to help reduce foetal death and brain damage during labour and delivery.

I have no expertise in this matter. But I always get interested when a media organisation finds an international expert, and promotes them as the sole source of truth, without any nuance.

A quick google finds the following on Dr Schifrin (who is 87 years old):

• A court recently ruled his expert testimony as inadmissible as his conclusion “that there was a lack of standard of care by the nurse and the physician is not based on sufficient data or facts and not the product of reliable principles.”
• In 2007 he was censured for testimony in a case, and resigned from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
• A court noted “Dr. Schifrin’s causation theory, which has been excluded as unreliable by other courts”

Now again I am not saying who is right or wrong, or if Schifrin is right or wrong. My objection is that Newsroom presents him an authoritative expert, without any qualification.