A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity’s show helped spread the coronavirus

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21229360/coronavirus-covid-19-fox-news-sean-hannity-misinformation-death?fbclid=IwAR0ypziz1-jNTseDy3o8_WhUDX-gl0d4HJR6ZCyX-GjC9M2KxFuiu6LBVTQ

By Zack Beauchamp Apr 22, 2020, 8:40am EDT


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.”

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In the survey, they ask viewers which shows they watched and how much they watched them. They also asked when, if it all, they started changing their behavior in response to the outbreak — things like canceling their vacation plans, doing social distancing, and washing their hands with increased frequency.

They then ran a regression analysis to see if behavior changes correlated with any viewership patterns. It turned out that, when compared to viewers of other Fox News shows, both Hannity and Carlson fans were distinct and statistically significant outliers.

“Viewers of Hannity changed their behavior five days later than viewers of other shows,” they write. “Viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight changed their behavior three days earlier than viewers of other shows.”

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That’s where the second regression model comes in. It exploits a pattern the authors identified in television viewership: It tends to be highest 2.5 hours after the sun sets, regardless of what’s on the air. This makes sense: People like to be outside or doing other stuff during daylight hours, settle in at home to watch TV for a bit after the sun sets, and then tend to go to bed within a couple of hours.

Around the country, Carlson’s show is broadcast in the hour before Hannity’s. This sets up a random experiment: In counties where the sun sets earlier, Carlson viewership will be higher (and vice-versa when the sun sets later). This isn’t because people prefer Carlson to Hannity for any particular reason, but simply because they want to watch something on Fox and Carlson’s show happens to be on.

Studying this random pattern allows them to remove the possibility that it’s something about the kind of people who watch the shows, rather than the programing itself, that’s driving the results.

In a second regression incorporating the sunset data, focusing on media markets where Fox is popular while once again controlling for confounders, the relationship holds: Places where Hannity viewership is randomly higher than Carlson viewership tend to have higher rates of infection and deaths.

“Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight increased the number of total cases and deaths in the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic,” the authors conclude. “Our findings indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for health outcomes.”

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