Nearly a month ago, we pointed out the life-and-death danger of disinformation when President Trump’s premature elevation of a supposed cure for COVID-19 not only left those who needed the drug to manage their Lupus unable to get it, but also led to at least one death.
Sadly, that was hardly the only disinformation (deliberately) harming public health, as a new working paper from the University of Chicago looked at what happened in places where Fox News viewers watched more Sean Hannity, who downplayed the threat, than Tucker Carlson, who took it more seriously.
The paper hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, but independent experts who spoke to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp about it didn’t see any red flags or obvious problems so with the major caveat that these results are preliminary, here’s the key finding: places where people watched more Hannity than Carlson experienced more COVID-19 cases in early March, and more deaths starting in mid-March.
The researchers controlled for a variety of demographic issues, as well as the different time slots for the show, and actually found that “the estimated effects of exposure [to Hannity] become stronger as we control for more factors.”
The analysis shows “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.”
This is certainly an extraordinary result, and warrants appropriate skepticism. But, as the study authors note, it shouldn’t be all that unexpected, given similar pre-peer-reviewed working papers are showing that red states were slower to adopt social distancing, with Trump voters particularly dismissive of the threat- until the news broke that people at the conservative CPAC conference were infected.
While Fox News of course contested the paper as misrepresenting Hannity’s dismissiveness, the paper actually did a text analysis of transcripts and quantitatively showed the difference in how the two hosts handled the duty of keeping their audiences informed.
And fortunately, the analysis of the scripts of the shows found that Hannity began sounding more serious about the coronavirus by mid-March, which means that hopefully fewer people were led astray by his disinformation,got infected, and then infected others. Unfortunately, the continuation of bizarre conspiracies and the recent surge in astroturf campaigns to end coronavirus mitigation measures means we’re apt to see yet another round of deaths from denial.
Not that the groups responsible care. As DeSmog found as part of their investigation into the overlap between climate and COVID denial, those new organizations clamoring to sacrifice the lives of hourly workers so Karens can get a haircut are coming from the same Koch and Mercer funding pool as climate denial groups.
If only a few weeks of denial from just one host has such a demonstrable impact on audiences, just imagine how much damage has been done by these group’s coordinated climate denial broadcast by Fox News for the past thirty years.
Time will tell how effective these Koch- and Mercer-funded groups will be in convincing the public that the economy is more important than public health threats, be they coronavirus or climate.
But as we’re seeing, those who need that lesson most may not survive to learn it. And worst of all, they’ll take a lot of innocent people with them.
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