I think, at the least, if journalists get some quotes from other scientists before publishing a piece on a new model it would be a major win.

I don’t think there’s value in doing this, unless the second opinion disagrees with the original model. It’s not hard to find a second “expert” to agree with just about anything, if you look hard enough.

The number of people who agree with something tells you, as a rational person, practically nothing - it reminds me of the absurd compilation argument “One Hundred Authors Against Einstein”: https://archive.org/details/HundertAutorenGegenEinstein/mode...

Einstein’s famous reply: “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”

An article with just opposing positions would just confuse the reader. It's also like how the media has climate skeptics debate climate scientists one-on-one as if there is an actual debate to be had, magnifying the level of climate skepticism in the field.

I think you missed the point of the story.

Journalists and their publications don't give a crap about scientific truth. They care about maximizing clicks and traffic. If a group of scientists give them the truth and another group gives them a more sensational story, they'll print the latter. Scientists will never win this battle.

That's fair. I mean asking folks to be more circumspect in general is probably a good thing.

I prefer though to look at problems through the lens of incentive structures (keeping in mind humans generally heavily time discount incentives and what incentivizes people is not always obvious! Death isn't always much of a disincentive beyond a rather short time horizon). And here I'm having a hard time seeing easy ways to tweak the incentive structure.

Often they do, but that doesn't affect the piece they write. It's not at all difficult to find people complaining "I was interviewed for this article, most of what I said was left out, and to the extent I am quoted, it's to give the impression that my beliefs are the exact opposite of what I explained to the journalist at length".

That would just mean nobody would publish articles about models, as there are no models that don't have some scientists disagreeing with them.

Which is fine. It'd be far better if people weren't trying to model COVID-19 at all. It's clearly far beyond our societies capabilities today. We can't even get useful data let alone feed it into a simulation of society.

Asking more of journalists at this juncture may be a tall order. The bar for them has been trending downward, due largely to a lack of funding and an abundance of competition, many of whom have little regard for journalistic standards.