Fox News Can't Save Trump From The Reality Of The Coronavirus
By Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut
As President Trump’s response to the coronavirus has careened from denial to incoherence, some of the blame for his baffling contradictions has been apportioned to his media sidekick, Fox Cable News. Sean Hannity dismissed the virus as incidental, claiming that the disease was merely an opportunity for the media and the socialist Democrats to “weaponize” their attacks on the President. Appearing on “Fox and Friends,” Jerry Falwell, Jr. told viewers that the North Koreans were to blame for the coronavirus.
Critics have claimed that Trump has not merely been singing from the same hymnal, but that he is following Fox’s lead in how he responds to the coronavirus threat. When Fox finally switched to a blunt acknowledgment that Americans were in serious danger from the pandemic, Trump echoed that. Fox and Trump then changed their tune again, both arguing that quarantining Americans would amount to a cure worse than the disease. This is hardly a cynical assessment of the President: Trump frequently speaks on the phone with Sean Hannity after Hannity’s program concludes.
The seriousness of this collusion cannot be overstated. If Americans are being given false information about a deadly disease because of the twin pursuit of TV ratings and a president’s desire to seek viewers’ approval, this is politics at its worst.
This leads to a simple question: were Fox viewers influenced in a way that led them to underestimate the dangers of the pandemic?
Disentangling a potential “Fox effect” is no small challenge. Fox viewers, highly conservative ideologues, and strong Republican identifiers are overlapping demographics. Also, the self-selection bias of who chooses to watch Fox is severe. Still, with those cautions in mind, the early polling is troubling. After the virus began to spread, surveys revealed a sharp divergence between Democrats and Republicans, with Republican identifiers demonstrating far less concern about the disease. In an NPR/Marist poll taken March 15-17th, half of Republican respondents said the coronavirus threat was exaggerated. A mid-March survey by YouGov showed that roughly 70 percent of mainstream news consumers (CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the nightly broadcast news) said they were worried about the virus. In comparison, only 38 percent of Fox viewers were similarly concerned. Other Data for Progress polling has found that Fox News views were more likely to believe that hydroxychloroquine is a proven treatment for coronavirus. Another study finds that different Fox hosts have a different impact of viewers, based on how seriously they took the crisis.
These studies focus on individuals who say Fox News is the main source of news they pay attention to, a very Republican group, but here we examine a larger group of Fox viewers. From March 27-28th we ran a survey that allows us to compare people who watch Fox News frequently but also look to other sources for information. A comparison between the attitudes on the danger of the coronavirus between Fox and CNN viewers suggests that Fox doesn’t appear to have much effect on the average viewer when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. Part of the difference between this and the YouGov poll is surely due to the deteriorating situation in the United States in the elapsed time between the two survey instruments. This may have been accentuated for those living in conservative areas of the country. At first the coronavirus may have seemed to be a distant threat in blue America, where large cities were bearing the brunt of the contagion. Republican governors have been more reluctant to order sheltering in place edicts. Over time it has become clearer that the disease does not respect political boundaries.
Differences may also be due to the wording of the questions we put on the Data for Progress survey, which take a different approach than the earlier YouGov survey. Respondents here were asked not merely if they watched or listened to these media, but with what frequency. For both Fox and CNN they were asked if they watched “daily or almost daily,” “once or twice a week or so,” “once in awhile,” or “not at all.” We asked the question this way because general questions about media consumption exaggerate the degree to which people really follow a source. Research we’ve done at Tufts on media consumption shows that there are very high levels of positive responses when subjects are simply asked if they watched, listened, or read a particular national media outlet. In terms of cable, there’s a lot of difference between a casual channel flipper and someone who sits down to watch a whole hour of Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow.
To give us greater confidence that we were not picking up something idiosyncratic about cable viewing, we added an identical question about listening to talk radio. (Talk radio is almost exclusively conservative as there are no major political talk radio shows hosted by a liberal.)
Across four straightforward tests it’s difficult to discern a clear, strong Fox effect. The survey asked “Taking into consideration both your risk of contracting it and the seriousness of the illness, how worried are you personally about experiencing coronavirus?” We cross tabulated responses to this with the frequency variables described above. Examining just those who said they were daily or almost daily watchers, we see a modest differential in personal concern about the coronavirus (Figure 1). Fox viewers are 11 points lower in professed concern than CNN viewers, and talk radio listeners are about 6 points lower. When we relax the consumption standard to “once or twice a week or so,” the differences disappear almost entirely.
We see much the same pattern when we analyze responses to a question that asked subjects if they thought “The coronavirus is a hoax.” “Hoax” has become a radioactive term as President Trump used the word early on and so did Sean Hannity. Only about 16 percent of those who watch Fox or CNN daily or almost daily believe it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that the virus is a hoax. Talk radio listeners are about 10 points higher in their response (Figure 2). The same test for those who are more occasional consumers shows virtually no differences among the outlets.
These findings may not be generalizable to any broader patterns of Fox’s impact on viewers. And it’s not without reason to believe that Fox has a unique effect on its audiences. Among Republicans it is the most trusted source of news as well as their greatest source of political news. For Republicans who say they restrict themselves to one news source, it is Fox they bubble up with (at 70 percent). There is nothing comparable on the liberal side as liberals do not gravitate to any one news site.
Yet there is also good reason to believe that Fox viewers do not live in the restricted news environment that is often ascribed to them. According to Pew, Republican news bubblers amount to only about 20 percent of GOP self-identifiers or leaners. Even if one relies only on Fox, its programs are not without discussion of contrasting points of view. As Sarah Sobieraj and one of us (Berry) demonstrate in our book, The Outrage Industry, the hosts of conservative programs often tell viewers or listeners what the other side is saying. It is the raison d'être of conservative outrage media: the other side is biased, they hate conservatives, but we’re here to tell you the truth.
Fox has been a continuing source of misinformation on the coronavirus. Beyond its hosts’ malfeasance is a shocking level of corporate irresponsibility by its parent company, led by Lachlan Murdoch, which is ultimately responsible for the content on the cable network. But Fox Cable News has not blinded most of its viewers to the realities of the pandemic.
Jeffrey M. Berry is Skuse Professor of Political Science at Tufts University.
James M. Glaser is Professor of Political Science and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University
Deborah J. Schildkraut is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tufts University