A disturbing new study suggests that Fox News host Sean Hannity helped spread the coronavirus, linking the right-wing commentator’s misinformation to “a greater number of Covid-19 cases and deaths” Vox reported Wednesday.
The research, conducted by economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott, focused on Fox news programming in February and early March.
As noted by Vox, media critics have warned that the decision from leading Fox News hosts to downplay the outbreak could cost lives. Now, the new study provides statistical evidence that, in the case of Sean Hannity, that’s exactly what happened.
The research, conducted by economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott, focused on Fox news programming in February and early March.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, “Hannity’s show was downplaying or ignoring the virus, while fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson was warning viewers about the disease’s risks,” the report says.
Using both a poll of Fox News viewers over age 55 and publicly available data on television-watching patterns, they calculate that Fox viewers who watched Hannity rather than Carlson were less likely to adhere to social distancing rules, and that areas where more people watched Hannity relative to Carlson had higher local rates of infection and death.
“Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.”
The paper is consistent with a wide body of research finding that media consumption in general, and Fox News viewership in particular, can have a pretty powerful effect on individual behavior, noting that “it makes sense that an older American’s favorite TV host telling them they don’t need to worry about the coronavirus would cause them to ignore stay-at-home orders and care less about thoroughly washing their hands.”
The research on this particular study seems quite rigorous, according to those scholars who have taken early looks.
“It’s a good paper; they took pains to control for many alternative explanations,” writes Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies technology and research methods.
“This really looks like a causal effect of misinformation [leading] to deaths.”
You can read more here.
