Fox News Calls COVID-19 Death Study 'Reckless'

A new study published by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics makes a claim that will strike many as incendiary: “Greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ is strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic,” says the paper.

The Chicago Tribune reports the working paper is called “Misinformation During a Pandemic,” and it derives from the authors’ finding that Carlson and Sean Hannity, the two most popular hosts on the right-wing Fox News Network, initially treated coronavirus very differently.

“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,” Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago and his co-authors Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth and David Yanagizawa-Drott wrote in the paper released Sunday evening.

An analysis of show transcripts was conducted to document what the authors conclude are the significant differences in the hosts’ handling of the topic early on. For example, the paper cites a Feb. 27 Hannity transcript in which the host states, “And today, thankfully, zero people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus. Zero.” Two days earlier, Carlson was telling his viewers that it was possible a million people could die in the U.S. from it.

From there, the authors commissioned a poll to determine how Fox News viewers responded to the coronavirus threat, and they also analyzed county-by-county viewership patterns and COVID-19 infection and death numbers.

The more than 1,000 Fox viewers surveyed said they were much more likely to have changed their behavior before March 1 in response to the threat “if they watched Tucker,” said Yanagizawa-Drott, who teaches at the University of Zurich. “And if they watched Hannity, they’re much more likely to change behavior after March 1.”

As the paper put it, “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.”

But it’s in the county analysis where the authors arrive at their strongest conclusion, that there were more COVID-19 cases and deaths in places where there is a preference for watching Hannity over Carlson compared to places where the opposite is true.

Comparing areas with a meaningful viewership difference on March 14, for instance, they found “approximately 30 percent more cases” of people contracting the disease in Hannity-favoring areas versus Carlson-favoring areas, he said. Two weeks later, he said, they found roughly the same difference in the number of deaths in those areas.

But, says the paper, “the results suggest that in mid-March, after Hannity’s shift in tone, the diverging trajectories on COVID-19 cases begin to revert.”

Said a Fox News spokesperson when asked about the paper, “The selective cherry-picked clips of Sean Hannity’s coverage used in this study are not only reckless and irresponsible, but down right factually wrong. As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered Covid-19 since the early days of the story. The ‘study’ almost completely ignores his coverage and repeated, specific warnings and concerns from January 27-February 26 including an early interview with Dr. Fauci in January. This is a reckless disregard for the truth.”