Fox News persuades viewers to defy public health guidance from wisepowder's blog
Fox News persuades viewers to defy public health guidance
In the critical early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States—when total confirmed cases numbered in hundreds rather than millions—Fox News persuaded viewers to defy social distancing advice offered, with increasing urgency, by public health officials.To get more fox latest news, you can visit shine news official website.
That’s the conclusion of new research by Shirsho Biswas, a newly appointed assistant professor of marketing at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.Biswas co-wrote the paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research ahead of peer review, with colleagues from Columbia University and the University of Chicago, where he was finishing his doctoral work.
The researchers found that a one point increase in the Nielsen rating of Fox News viewership resulted in 8.9 percentage points less compliance to public health advisories to stay at home. Or, to put it another way, every 10 percent increase in Fox News viewership above the average led to a 1.2 percentage point reduction in the propensity to stay at home.
“We leave it to public health experts to determine if this effect is large enough to affect public health in a meaningful way. We are not experts in modeling how COVID-19 spreads,” Biswas says. “What we can document is that Fox News is persuasive in terms of viewers choosing to social distance less.”Nearly half of all Americans report that they get their news primarily from television. And a big share of this is delivered by the 24-hour cable news networks of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
Fox News, the most-watched of these news networks, has real power to influence its viewers’ attitudes on voting, vaccines and climate change, according to recent studies.
But what about pandemics? As COVID-19 was first gaining a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, Biswas partnered with several colleagues—Andrey Simonov and Szymon Sacher of Columbia University and Jean-Pierre Dube of the University of Chicago—to investigate whether Fox News was having an impact on adherence to public health advice. Specifically, was Fox influencing viewers to defy the science-backed recommendations to stay at home and practice social distancing that were issued by increasingly concerned state, local and federal public health officials?
Establishing causality in matters of cable news is challenging, since many viewers self-select the network that they feel most closely aligns with their personal values and beliefs. And a truly controlled experiment—tracking the behavior of participants who are randomly assigned to watch only one network—would be logistically impossible.
In the critical early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States—when total confirmed cases numbered in hundreds rather than millions—Fox News persuaded viewers to defy social distancing advice offered, with increasing urgency, by public health officials.To get more fox latest news, you can visit shine news official website.
That’s the conclusion of new research by Shirsho Biswas, a newly appointed assistant professor of marketing at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.Biswas co-wrote the paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research ahead of peer review, with colleagues from Columbia University and the University of Chicago, where he was finishing his doctoral work.
The researchers found that a one point increase in the Nielsen rating of Fox News viewership resulted in 8.9 percentage points less compliance to public health advisories to stay at home. Or, to put it another way, every 10 percent increase in Fox News viewership above the average led to a 1.2 percentage point reduction in the propensity to stay at home.
“We leave it to public health experts to determine if this effect is large enough to affect public health in a meaningful way. We are not experts in modeling how COVID-19 spreads,” Biswas says. “What we can document is that Fox News is persuasive in terms of viewers choosing to social distance less.”Nearly half of all Americans report that they get their news primarily from television. And a big share of this is delivered by the 24-hour cable news networks of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
Fox News, the most-watched of these news networks, has real power to influence its viewers’ attitudes on voting, vaccines and climate change, according to recent studies.
But what about pandemics? As COVID-19 was first gaining a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, Biswas partnered with several colleagues—Andrey Simonov and Szymon Sacher of Columbia University and Jean-Pierre Dube of the University of Chicago—to investigate whether Fox News was having an impact on adherence to public health advice. Specifically, was Fox influencing viewers to defy the science-backed recommendations to stay at home and practice social distancing that were issued by increasingly concerned state, local and federal public health officials?
Establishing causality in matters of cable news is challenging, since many viewers self-select the network that they feel most closely aligns with their personal values and beliefs. And a truly controlled experiment—tracking the behavior of participants who are randomly assigned to watch only one network—would be logistically impossible.
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