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- Title
Frontiers: The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Noncompliance with Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- Authors
Simonov, Andrey; Sacher, Szymon; Dubé, Jean-Pierre; Biswas, Shirsho
- Abstract
Cable news channels—and Fox News in particular—affected the extent to which viewers' complied with experts' social distancing guidelines early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. To what extent do mass media outlets influence viewers' trust in scientific evidence and compliance with behavior recommended by scientific experts? Exploiting the U.S. lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we analyze a large longitudinal database that combines daily stay-at-home behavior from approximately 8 million mobile phones and local viewership of cable news networks. Early in the pandemic, several of Fox News' hosts downplayed the severity of the pandemic and the risks associated with the transmission of the virus. A combination of regression analysis and a natural experiment finds that a 10% increase in viewership of Fox News in a zip code causes a 0.76-percentage-point reduction in compliance with stay-at-home behavior. The results imply a media persuasion rate that is larger than typical advertising persuasion rates on consumer behavior. Similar analyses using viewership of MSNBC and CNN, which supported lockdown measures, were inconclusive but suggested a smaller, positive effect on compliance with social distancing regulations.
- Subjects
FOX News; SOCIAL distancing; COVID-19 pandemic; MASS media influence; CABLE News Network; MSNBC; TELEVISION program ratings; CONSUMER behavior
- Publication
Marketing Science, 2022, Vol 41, Issue 2, p230
- ISSN
0732-2399
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1287/mksc.2021.1328