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Media Publishes New ‘Study’: Coronavirus Deaths Were Sean Hannity’s Fault, Using ‘Sophisticated’ New Research

Media Publishes New ‘Study’: Coronavirus Deaths Were Sean Hannity’s Fault, Using ‘Sophisticated’ New Research

The liberal “news/culture” website Vox has published a new “sophisticated” study and they claim that a majority of the coronavirus deaths were a result of Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Of course, Vox leaves out that the entire mainstream media and Democrats downplayed the virus as well. Then, to top it all off, they don’t claim Hannity viewers are dying they claim they are probably the ones killing everyone.

This “new study” supposedly proves that Fox News and Sean Hannity are to blame for the COVID-19 deaths, China is ok though.

The study was done by liberal economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott, they focused on Fox News shows February and early March.

Here’s what they reported:

Hannity’s show was downplaying or ignoring the virus, while fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson was warning viewers about the disease’s risks.

Using both a poll of Fox News viewers over age 55 and publicly available data on television-watching patterns, they calculate that Fox viewers who watched Hannity rather than Carlson were less likely to adhere to social distancing rules, and that areas where more people watched Hannity relative to Carlson had higher local rates of infection and death.

“Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.”

The paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed but they plan to and have it published in a journal. The “study” does not mention one time the liberal media downplayed the Wuhan virus and attacked Trump over the travel ban. Below is an explanation over how the “researchers” came to their conclusions.

First, the authors provide evidence that there was a difference in how Hannity and Carlson covered the coronavirus outbreak in February and early March. Second, they present data from their poll showing that Hannity viewers were less likely to follow social distancing rules than Carlson viewers. Third, they used data on television viewership and the coronavirus to show that higher rates of Hannity viewership relative to Carlson viewership were correlated with higher rates of local infection and death.

Next, the researchers investigated if this difference in tone actually affected the way viewers of the two programs thought about coronavirus. To do so, they conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,045 Republicans aged 55 and up who reported watching Fox News at least once a week.

They then ran a regression analysis to see if behavior changes correlated with any viewership patterns. It turned out that, when compared to viewers of other Fox News shows, both Hannity and Carlson fans were distinct and statistically significant outliers.

“Viewers of Hannity changed their behavior five days later than viewers of other shows,” they write. “Viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight changed their behavior three days earlier than viewers of other shows.”

The final part of the paper uses two different regression models to show that, in fact, there is good reason to believe that Hannity viewership did increase coronavirus deaths relative to Carlson viewership.

After controlling for a number of confounding variables, ranging from overall television viewership rates to demographic factors like race, they find a clear relationship: Areas with greater Hannity viewership had more cases and more deaths. This relationship weakened after Hannity changes his show’s tune in mid-March, suggesting that it is in fact the programming driving the changes.

But here is the pinnacle folks, it’s not that Hannity’s viewers were dying according to the study, it was that those horrible, old, white conservatives were killing others.

“To be clear, this doesn’t show that Hannity viewers are necessarily the ones getting sick and dying. It could be that they’re asymptomatic carriers, simply spreading the disease to others without suffering themselves. All this regression shows is that higher Hannity viewership in a particular area is correlated with higher coronavirus infection rates and deaths in that area.”

Not one time did the study refer to the fact the mainstream media also downplayed the virus, as seen in the example below.

I wonder how many deaths this caused?

Vox

Written by Staff Writer - April 22, 2020