Watching Fox News May Be Harmful to Your Health

(Screenshot: Fox Business)

Personally, I have long viewed watching Fox News as a form of self-administered lobotomy given that studies have shown its viewers to be among the most poorly informed and its programming often consisting of propaganda rather than legitimate news. Now, in the age of Covid-19, a new study (which can be found here) suggests that watching Fox News may also be harmful to one's health and may literally endanger Fox viewers' lives but also the lives of others in their communities as Fox News viewers failed to accept the dangers of the pandemic and refuse to comply with social distancing, wearing masks, etc.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the study's findings which  also note the ties between support of Donald Trump and noncompliance with stay home orders and other heath precautions.  Here are article excerpts:

A new study produced by business school profs at Columbia and University of Chicago suggests that viewing Fox News is strongly correlated with ignoring social distancing guidance during the first weeks of the COVID19 epidemic and is in fact driving that non-compliance.

The researchers looked at geospatial data derived from anonymized cell phone data and cable channel position by ZIP code around the country. They found that a 1% increase in Fox News viewership in a zip code reduced social distancing by 8.9%.

The study abstract follows …

We test for and measure the effects of cable news in the US on regional differences in compliance with recommendations by health experts to practice social distancing during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of Fox News viewership on stay-at-home behavior by using only the incremental local viewership due to the quasi-random assignment of channel positions in a local cable line-up. The average partial effect of Fox News viewership in a zipcode implies that 1 percentage point increase in cable viewership reduces the propensity to stay at home by 8.9 percentage points compared to the prepandemic average.  We find a persuasion rate of Fox News on non-compliance with stay-at-home behavior during the crisis of about 33.5%-50% across our various social distancing metrics.

From reviewing the study it’s not entirely clear to me whether the persuasive effect of Fox News is demonstrated as opposed to the correlation. Fox News viewership is a marker for conservatives. Conservatives are less likely to social distance, etc. But that likely amounts to something similar since Fox is the key source of political information not only for Fox viewers but for the conservative information ecosystem generally.

The authors do note, revealingly, that they are not able to fully distinguish between the impact of Fox News commentators versus the administration officials and especially [Trump] the President whose views are so aggressively repeated and amplified.