If you’re anything like me, you’ve been telling your mother, father, grandparents, great aunt Sally, or whoever it is in your life who still manages to support Donald Trump somehow, that Fox News is eating their brains. We set their TVs to block the channel when they’re not looking and we waste our breath on countless conversations and arguments to try to “save” them.
But thanks to a new clinical study from business school professors at Columbia and the University of Chicago, you can now cite actual research from experts suggesting that consuming “news” from Fox could legitimately be detrimental to your health.
Talking Points Memo, regarding the bombshell study, says, “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%.”
And this is what they found:
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.”
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Long story short, in the midst of this massive pandemic, Fox News has been pushing Donald Trump’s crazy agenda, which consists of skirting virtually every guideline and recommendation put out by actual professionals — i.e. social distancing, face coverings, staying home from work, etc.
Therefore, those who regularly consume their news from Fox Network are far more likely to skirt the rules as well. Meaning they’re also far more likely to get sick, potentially fatally sick, from the coronavirus — especially considering that most Fox viewers are in an age group that’s extremely high-risk for fatal complications of the virus.
At this point, the experts literally say that watching Fox could kill you.
We’ve been saying that all along.
You can read the full study here.
Featured image via screen capture
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