All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point.  If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money.Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch.  Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measures of how widely read their articles are, as a figure of merit to how well they are performing.  Private sector newsmedia are rewarded financially in more or less direct proportion to how widely read (or at least clicked on) their articles are, not how well informed the reader is after they're done reading it (if they even do read past the headline).If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed.  It's not bad at it by mistake, it's bad at it as an inevitable consequence of its design.