“The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’s Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.
“We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic,” said Irene Pasquetto, chief editor of the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, which published one of the studies.
A working paper posted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in May examined whether these incorrect beliefs affected real-world behavior.
The authors used anonymous location data from millions of cellphones to explore how the popularity of Fox News in a given Zip code related to social distancing practices there. By March 15, they found, a 10 percent increase in Fox News viewership within a Zip code reduced its residents’ propensity to stay home, in compliance with public health guidelines, by about 1.3 percentage points.
Given total stay-at-home behavior increased by 20 percentage points during the study period, that effect size is “pretty large,” said Andrey Simonov, the study’s lead author. It’s comparable to Fox’s persuasive effect on voting behavior, as identified in a 2017 paper[1] by a different team.”
If the show does not take the virus seriously,
viewer behavior is affected
viewer behavior is affected
One of the studies focused on Fox News viewers 55 and older in areas where Sean Hannity’s show is more or less popular than Tucker Carlson’s program. Hannity viewers changed their pandemic-related behaviors like hand-washing or canceling travel plans four days later than other Fox News viewers. By contrast, Carlson’s viewership changed behaviors three days earlier. The results were that a one standard deviation increase in Hannity viewership compared to Carlson was associated with approximately 32 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14 and approximately 23 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28. The differences fade after the end of March presumably because since the middle of March, Hannity’s coverage had become quite close to Carlson’s in treating COVID-19 seriously.
Footnote:
“The largest elasticity magnitudes are on individuals from the opposite ideology of
the channel. Were a viewer initially at the ideology of the median Democratic voter
in 2008 to watch an additional three minutes of Fox News [FNC] per week, her likelihood
of voting Republican would increase by 1.03 percentage points. Another pattern that
emerges from the table is that Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats
than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans. This last feature is consistent with the
regression result that the IV effect of Fox is greater and more consistent than the
corresponding effect for MSNBC.
We find a persuasion rate of 58 percent in
2000, 27 percent in 2004, and 28 percent in 2008 for FNC. FNC is consistently more
effective at converting viewers than is MSNBC which has corresponding estimated
persuasion rates of just 16 percent, 0 percent, and 8 percent.
Our estimates imply increasing
effects of FNC on the Republican vote share in presidential elections over time,
from 0.46 points in 2000 to 6.34 points in 2008. Furthermore, we estimate that
cable news can increase polarization and explain about two-thirds of the increase
among the public in the United States, and that this increase depends on both a
persuasive effect of cable news and the existence of tastes for like-minded news.
Finally, we find that an influence-maximizing owner of the cable news channels
could have large effects on vote shares, but would have to sacrifice some levels of
viewership to maximize influence.”
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