Misinformation During a Pandemic

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, David Yanagizawa-Drott. Social Science Research Network, 2020

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effects of news coverage of the novel coronavirus by the two most widely-viewed cable news shows in the United States – Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight, both on Fox News – on viewers' behavior and downstream health outcomes. 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. We first validate these differences in content with independent coding of show transcripts. In line with the differences in content, we present novel survey evidence that Hannity's viewers changed behavior in response to the virus later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson's viewers changed behavior earlier. We then turn to the effects on the pandemic itself, examining health outcomes across counties. First, we document that 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. The relationship is stable across an expansive set of robustness tests. To better identify the effect of differential viewership of the two shows, we employ a novel instrumental variable strategy exploiting variation in when shows are broadcast in relation to local sunset times. These estimates also show that greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with a greater number of county-level cases and deaths. Furthermore, the results suggest that in mid-March, after Hannity's shift in tone, the diverging trajectories on COVID-19 cases begin to revert. We provide additional evidence consistent with misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data. While our findings cannot yet speak to long-term effects, they indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for how a disease ultimately affects the population.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53c7f9dbfbcb2ecb297e51fce2d1a4bbb246a70e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Poverty and economic dislocation reduce compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place protocols (2020, neutral): “President Trump’s supporters are more skeptical of mainstream media and federal government policies in general ( Iyengar et al., 2019 ) and early statements by administration officials and some media dismissed or deflected the COVID-19 threat ( Painter and Qiu, 2020; Bursztyn et al., 2020 ).”
Mining Dual Emotion for Fake News Detection (2019, positive): “Thousands of news pieces with misleading content have been spreading through social media [44] and led to socio-economic disorder [6] and weakened the effect of pandemic prevention [4].”
Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic (2020, positive): “Ash et al. (2020), Bursztyn et al. (2020) and Simonov et al. (2020) find that people social distance less if quasi-randomly exposed to news sources that argue that COVID-19 is less risky, suggesting that media exposure is one possible driver for our results.2 Our work contributes to a broader…”
The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending (2020, positive): “Bursztyn et al. (2020) study the effect of media consumption on the perception of the corona virus.”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, neutral): “Bursztyn et al. (2020) show that greater exposure to theHannity show compared to the Tucker Carlson Tonight show in Fox News is associated with larger COVID-19 case numbers anddeaths.”
Lost in lockdown? COVID-19, social distancing, and mental health in Germany (2020, neutral): “…that people’s behavior towards compliance with prevention recommendations and lockdown policies can depend on media exposure and misinformation (Bursztyn et al. 2020), political leader’s communication (Ajzenman et al. 2020), people’s expectations about the length of the lockdown (Briscese et…”
The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020, positive): “21Following Martin and Yurukoglu (2017), we let 1 rating point correspond to 1.68 hours per week of Fox News We defer to health experts to determine whether the magnitude of the Fox persuasion rate would have a material effect on transmission and death rates.”
Crisis signaling: how Italy's coronavirus lockdown affected incumbent support in other European countries (2020, neutral): “Trump and conservative media hosts, like Sean Hannity on Fox News, have produced a differential mass public health response among conservative voters who comply less with social distancing measures (Allcott et al., 2020; Bursztyn et al., 2020; Gadarian, Goodman and Pepinsky, 2020).”