Washington Post: Conservative media may have intensified the pandemic – By John Sexton (Hot Air) / June 25 2020
The Post published an analysis of three recent studies which purport to connect conservative media to an intensification of the pandemic. A lot of that intensification is assumed as we’ll see. The first of the three was peer-reviewed and was based on a poll of 1,000 people.
Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection. But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exaggerated the pandemic’s threat “to damage the Trump presidency.”
The second study is described as a “working paper” meaning this is still pre-publication. It found an impact on travel based on Fox News viewership:
We find strong evidence of a Fox New viewership effect on several measures of the incremental propensity to stay at home during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis in the US, relative to January 2020 immediately before the outbreak. While comparable in magnitude to the voting context,
the persuasive effect of Fox Viewership on social distancing compliance is quite large, especially given that it defies the expert recommendations from leaders of the US and global health communities. Interestingly, we fail to find conclusive effects of CNN viewership on social distancing
compliance.
Continue to article: https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/06/25/washington-post-conservative-media-may-intensified-pandemic/
