University of Chicago study finds people who watched Sean Hannity were more likely to die from COVID-19

Mod: Interesting report from Raw Story about the dire effects of an influential cable news host lying about a plague.

Study finds people who watched Sean Hannity were more likely to die from COVID-19 (Raw Storylink): A new study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that “greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity has been heavily criticized for echoing President Donald Trump’s initial attempts to downplay the threat posed by the new coronavirus. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, his colleague at the right-leaning network who has framed the issue in more nationalistic terms, has been credited with convincing the president to take the pandemic seriously.

“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,” the researchers wrote in the working paper.

The two hosts diverged greatly on the issue in February. While Hannity expressed optimism that “zero people in the United States have died from the coronavirus,” Carlson warned viewers that the virus could kill 1 million people across the country.

The researchers commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 Fox News viewers, which found that Carlson’s viewers were more likely to change their behavior earlier than Hannity’s viewers. “We find that Hannity’s viewers on average changed their behavior in response to the coronavirus five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior three days earlier than other Fox News viewers,” the paper said.

The researchers then compared the death rate in counties that favored either host, finding “approximately 30% more COVID-19 cases” in areas that preferred Hannity than those that watched Carlson.

“Already by mid-March, we see a statistically significant difference — that there are greater case loads in places that favor Hannity over Tucker,” researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott told The Chicago Tribune.

“Then weeks later, we see a similar trajectory increase for deaths.” After Hannity’s “shift in tone,” however, “the diverging trajectories … began to revert,” the study said. The researchers argued that their findings were consistent with “misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data.”

Mod: More at the link.

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