Abstract
We document a causal effect of conservative Fox News Channel in the United States on physical distancing during COVID-19 pandemic. We measure county-level mobility covering all U.S. states and District of Columbia produced by GPS pings to 15-17 million smartphones and zip-code-level mobility using Facebook location data. Then, using the historical position of Fox News Channel in the cable lineup as the source of exogenous variation, we show that increased exposure to Fox News led to a smaller reduction in distance traveled and smaller increase in the probability to stay home after the national emergency declaration in the United States. Our results show that slanted media can have a harmful effect on containment efforts during a pandemic by affecting people's behaviour.
Highlights
Media play many important roles in people’s lives by transmitting information and shaping beliefs.1 Such beliefs include trust in government, trust in science, and threatExtended author information available on the last page of the article.perceptions, which can have behavioral implications in many contexts, including public health
Using the historical position of Fox News Channel in the cable lineup as the source of exogenous variation, we show that increased exposure to Fox News led to a smaller reduction in distance traveled and a smaller increase in the probability of staying home after the national emergency declaration in the USA
We estimate the effect of exposure to one popular media source (Fox)—that spread controversial partisan opinions and some unscientific medical advice during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—on mobility reduction and social distancing
Summary
Media play many important roles in people’s lives by transmitting information and shaping beliefs. Such beliefs include trust in government, trust in science, and threat. Researchers have used cell phone location data to measure commuting and economic activities (Kreindler and Miyauchi 2019) and segregation (Athey et al 2019); cellphones’ call data to investigate the impact of social networks on mobility (Buchel et al 2019; Blumenstock et al 2019), information transmission about social distancing practices (Tian et al 2020), and job referrals (Barwick et al 2019); and Facebook friendship data to measure social connectedness (Bailey et al 2018) and study its impact on disease transmission in the case of COVID-19 (Kuchler et al 2020) This type of data is especially useful in our context, since we can directly observe people’s behavior in terms of complying with social distancing policy and track real-time changes.
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