Fox News is now afraid of lawsuits because many of their TV personalities lied to the public -- telling them the pandemic of Coronavirus was a hoax. They should be worried. A new study was done at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago.
The study compared the two most popular shows on Fox -- Sean Hannity (who called the pandemic a hoax and denied its danger to Americans) and Tucker Carlson (who was warning of the Coronavirus dangers fairly early). The two charts above show the difference between those who primarily watched Hannity and those who primarily watched Carlson.Note that Carlson's curve is much flatter than Hannity's -- meaning that fewer people got ill from the virus among those watching Carlson than those watching Hannity.
The obvious conclusion is that the viewers believed what they were being told -- and those who watched Hannity didn't social distance (or did it later) and many got sick (and many died). Those watching Carlson did social distance earlier and were thus more protected (with fewer getting sick and dying).
Here is a statement from the Becker Friedman Institute regarding their study:
We study the effects of news coverage of the novel coronavirus by the two most widely-viewed cable news shows in the United States – Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight, both on Fox News – on viewers’ behavior and downstream health outcomes. Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February. We first validate these differences in content with independent coding of show transcripts. In line with the differences in content, we present novel survey evidence that Hannity’s viewers changed behavior in response to the virus later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior earlier. We then turn to the effects on the pandemic itself, examining health outcomes across counties. First, we document that greater viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic. The relationship is stable across an expansive set of robustness tests. To better identify the effect of differential viewership of the two shows, we employ a novel instrumental variable strategy exploiting variation in when shows are broadcast in relation to local sunset times. These estimates also show that greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with a greater number of county-level cases and deaths. Furthermore, the results suggest that in mid-March, after Hannity’s shift in tone, the diverging trajectories on COVID-19 cases begin to revert. We provide additional evidence consistent with misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data. While our findings cannot yet speak to long-term effects, they indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for how a disease ultimately affects the population.
