Sean Hannity's Fox News show helped spread of coronavirus, study suggests

Despite his insistence that he has always taken the coronavirus seriously, a new study suggests Sean Hannity's rhetoric helped spread the virus during the onset of the American outbreak.

The paper - authored by Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth and David Yanagizawa-Drott of the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute - examined Fox News programming between February and early March. The study specifically examines how the network's messaging influenced behaviour during the early days of the US coronavirus outbreak.

Throughout the paper, the authors compare the effects of Hannity's show - which downplayed or outright ignored the danger posed by the virus - and those of Tucker Carlson's show, which discussed the virus and its danger.

The authors concluded that Fox News viewers who watched Hannity's show were less likely to follow social distancing guidelines, and that areas where Hannity viewership was higher tended to correlate to higher 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," the authors wrote. "A one-standard deviation increases with approximately 30 per cent more Covid-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more Covid-19 deaths on March 28."

Hannity's show is more popular in areas where the virus has flourished, such as New Orleans and New Jersey. Areas where Carlson's show is more popular appear to have lower infection rates. ​ Hannity is Fox News' top rated commentator, averaging 4.2 million viewers daily. Mr Carlson is the networks' second highest rated host, pulling in 4 million daily viewers.

"Tucker Carlson sounded the alarm earlier, while if you look at Sean Hannity - yes, he talked on a few occasions about the coronavirus crisis, but not as often as Carlson, and he did not emphasise the potential threat to public health to the same extent," one of the authors wrote.

Hannity at one point referred to the virus as a "hoax" and suggested it was simply a political tool to use against President Donald Trump.

"It's like, 'oh let's bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,'" he said, referring to fears over the coronavirus.

In an interview with Newsweek, Hannity claims he never called the coronavirus a hoax, but suggested that using the coronavirus as a "bludgeon" was a hoax.

"They just go with their narrative. I never called it a 'hoax', I said it was a hoax for them to be using it as a bludgeon on Trump," he said.

Speaking to Forbes, a spokesman for Fox News disputes the claim that Hannity did not take the virus seriously.

"The selective cherry-picked clips of Sean Hannity's coverage used in this study are not only reckless and irresponsible, but downright factually wrong. As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered Covid-19 since the early days of the story," they said.

The timeline - which Hannity originally posted on his personal website – shows that he wasn't talking about the virus for most of the month of February.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, hired a team of lawyers to defend the company, anticipating people might sue the network over its coronavirus reporting.

A group in Washington has already sued the network, and earlier this month a group of journalists and communications professors penned a letter to Mr Murdoch and his son, Lachlan, reminding the men that the network's core viewership are the same people most at risk of dying from the virus.

Though the paper will still need to be peer reviewed, scholars speaking to Vox suggested the paper's research and methodology was solid.

"It's a good paper; they took pains to control for many alternative explanations," Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies technology and research methods, said. "This really looks like a causal effect of misinformation [leading] to deaths."

While the conclusions of the paper are alarming, they only examine how Fox News viewers behaved, and then specifically only viewers who watched two shows.

It is worth noting that other prominent cable news personalities - particularly MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and CNN's Anderson Cooper - were also late to the game reporting on the coronavirus.

The MSNBC anchor didn't begin reporting about the virus on a regular basis until the end of February, and Cooper first mentioned the looming outbreak on 17 February. As late as 4 March, Cooper was downplaying the danger of the virus, saying "if you're freaked out at all about the coronavirus, you should be more concerned about the flu."

Hannity also received criticism for comparing the virus to the flu on 27 February.

While Carlson's show began with a more serious analysis of the virus, it is worth noting that as the outbreak has worsened, he has become critical of social distancing guidelines and has praised protests organised by far-right conservative groups ostensibly protesting state stay-at-home orders.

The authors of the paper said they would continue to update their data and report their findings as more developments unfold.