There's a question mark in the title of this week's newsletter, because I'll be asking whether the Fox Corporation has caused an increase in COVID-19 mortality rates.
Why ask the question? It seems belligerent – and overly simplistic.
We know from multiple studies that COVID-19 mortality rates are higher among unvaccinated people. A study published last week shows that the more time people spend watching Fox News, the less likely they are to get vaccinated. So, can we infer that Fox has been, in effect, killing people?
I want to provide some context for this question, then describe the new study and offer an answer.
(Unless otherwise noted, when I refer to "Fox", I mean the cable TV channel (Fox News), the website (foxnews.com), the radio show (Fox News Radio), and the subscription video on demand service (Fox Nation).
The scope of the problem
If Fox contributes to lower COVID-19 vaccination rates and higher numbers of mortalities, the problem may only affect Republicans, given that they comprise nearly all of Fox's audience. (A 2020 Pew survey showed that among adults who rely on Fox as their primary source of news, 93% identify as Republican.)
If Fox does impact Republicans in this way, we might be able to explain a finding reported by Yale researchers last month. The Yale group found that although COVID-19 mortalities have been higher among Republicans than among Democrats since the early months of the pandemic, the difference increased sharply following the introduction of vaccines.
The logic here is grim and straightforward: COVID-19 vaccines reduce the incidence of COVID-19 mortalities. Republicans began to have much higher mortality rates than Democrats once vaccines were available, because Republicans were less likely to get vaccinated. They were less likely to do so owing in part to the influence of Fox.
Science journalism in Fox media
Fox is often criticized for inaccurate or misleading coverage of scientific topics, especially when political ideology seems to influence the topics it covers and the way it handle them.
Some of the criticisms focus on specific topics. For example, in a Union of Concerned Scientists study focusing on 600 televised segments that mentioned "global warming" or "climate change", Fox News was found to be accurate 28% of the time. (To put that statistic in context, accuracy rates for CNN and MSNBC were judged to be 70% and 92%, respectively.)
Other criticisms of Fox's science journalism aren't tied to specific topics. For example, Wikipedia administrators, who disagree with each other about many things, are pretty much unanimous in their reservations about citing Fox as a source. In 2020, the administrators wrote that "for science and political referencing there is no consensus regarding the reliability of Fox News, and it should be used with caution to verify contentious claims." In 2022, the administrators released a similar statement. The main concern is not that Fox is ideologically biased, but rather that it's just not reliable as a source for information about science and other topics.
In my opinion, the broader issue is that Fox doesn't maintain high standards for its science journalism. You can see this even in news items that aren't influenced by political ideology. Here's a typical example: On October 8, foxnews.com covered a new study linking walking to a lowered risk of cancer. The coverage is superficial, misrepresents key details from the study, and shows numerous signs of editorial disregard. For example, the article starts off with a description of the study in simple terms that most 8th graders could understand. Each of the first 11 paragraphs of the article consist of a single sentence. Then, the writer suddenly drops in a long paragraph on study limitations that's filled with unexplained jargon that no reader could decipher unless they'd taken a research methods or stats class in college and remember the material ("covariates were not measured at accelerometer-wear date... some potential for reverse causation may still exist..."). There's also at least one typo, and several hyperlink errors. For instance, the link provided to the study actually leads to a foxnews.com health page, which only links back to the original foxnews.com article, meaning that if you try to access the study you'll just get caught in an infinite loop of foxnews.com pages.
There are other issues with this article, and many other articles like it that could be cited, but I think you get the idea. Fox's science journalism is unbelievably shoddy, and not always in stories that reflect an ideological bias.
What makes this a worrisome problem is that foxnews.com isn't just some random blog with a few dozen subscribers. The website is visited by more than 290 million readers per month. The article I just described was picked up, verbatim, by Yahoo and the New York Post, which also have large readerships, and it was presumably also distributed by some number of news aggregators. Meanwhile, Fox News is the most-watched cable news network in the world (over 2 million prime-time viewers in the U.S. alone, with audiences in over 80 other countries as well).
You might argue that none of this matters, because people don't rely on Fox to learn science. All the same, studies do find troubling connections between exposure to Fox and scientific knowledge. For example, a 2020 study showed that the more time people spend on the Fox website, the less they know about science and other aspects of society. In this study, the researcher controlled for variables such as party affiliation and political ideology, which tells us that what may undermine knowledge of science isn't being Republican or conservative, but rather exposure to Fox.
In short, it matters that Fox science coverage is poor. My question, though, is that with respect to COVID-19 vaccines, has the coverage been so poor that it became, in effect, lethal?
Before addressing that question, I should be more specific about what I mean by "coverage". I don't think all aspects of Fox are equally dangerous.
Fox News and out-group homogeneity
Social psychologists use the phrase "out-group homogeneity effect" to describe the way we perceive members of out-groups as more similar than members of our own group. You can see this effect when Southerners underestimate the diversity of people from New England (and vice versa), rock-and-rollers find it hard to distinguish among country tunes, and racists claim that members of certain minority groups are all alike.
In most cases, people recognize that the other group is diverse; we just underestimate the extent of diversity. Thus, when people who dislike Fox criticize the organization, we tend to view it as a monolithic, barely-differentiated mass of reeking ideological drivel, and we may not appreciate its good points. I say "we" because I've been guilty of this. However, I realize now I've fallen prey to an out-group homogeneity effect.
Like any large news organization, Fox is a complex machine with numerous moving parts. The organization as a whole is not anti-vaccination. You can easily find ideologically-neutral updates on vaccine approvals, human interest stories on the benefits of vaccination, and editorials recommending vaccination. Here's typical example: In July 2021, foxnews.com ran a story on Republican Senator Ron Johnson's requests to Pfizer and Moderna for more data on the adverse effects of vaccination. The story describes those effects and includes interviews with people who've experienced them, and thus, if the journalists had wanted to be anything less than 100% supportive of vaccines, they could've easily done so. However, Senator Johnson, as well as the people who experienced side effects, are all quoted at length as being pro-vaccine, and the journalists do a competent job of describing the effectiveness of current vaccines and the rarity of side effects that have been observed. On the whole, it seems like a balanced, pro-vaccine piece.
Fox often lards their "news" with opinions in a way that wouldn't be permitted by higher-quality news organizations, but you can still distinguish between what they present as news versus their opinion articles and broadcasts. In my experience, their news tends to be pro-vaccine, with negativity only expressed about the politics of vaccination. For example, it's typical to find stories in which vaccines are praised but vaccine mandates are disparaged.
Vaccine disinformation in Fox
In my view, the problem with Fox isn't a general anti-vaccination bias, but rather dangerously low standards for science reporting, including politically-motivated tolerance for disinformation about science (and other topics). In particular, Fox allows some of its news reports, and many of its opinion articles and broadcasts, to promote information that's demonstrably false and harmful. The opinion pieces are most harmful, in my view. In other words, rather than saying that Fox in general is anti-vaccination, it seems more reflective of the diversity of the organization to say that the news is often pro-vaccine, but inaccurate and dangerous information about vaccines is allowed to be expressed in its opinion pieces.
For example, in my newsletter on Fox News and vaccination statistics last June, I called out Tucker Carlson for misinforming viewers that “more than 3,000” Americans have died from COVID-19 vaccines". The source of this statistic was the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS), which cautions users on its website that literally any member of the public can submit a report, and thus these reports "may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable". In fact, as I noted, VAERS statistics include people who died from accidents, from suicides, and from other incidents following vaccination that were almost certainly unrelated to vaccination. I concluded that Carlson was either mistaken or intentionally misleading viewers.
Carlson, along with other prominent Fox News hosts like Laura Ingraham and their guests, routinely churn out vaccinate disinformation and innuendos (Ingraham, for example, has repeatedly described the vaccines as "experimental", which is accurate, but only in the sense that research is ongoing; it's misleading to use that term without noting that these vaccines were FDA-approved on the basis of completed studies). And so, given that the opinion side of Fox shows clear anti-vaccination biases, what's the overall impact on audiences?
A new study
In an October 7 Scientific Reports study, Matteo Pinna and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zurich) looked at the impact of three cable channels – Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC – on vaccination rates.
Viewing time, available from Nielsen, was recorded as the number of minutes each household tuned into each of the three channels in January and February 2020. Gallup data were available on political party affiliation and ideology. Vaccine rates were also recorded, along with information on other key variables.
The main finding was that the more time people spent watching Fox News, the lower the vaccination rates. This pattern was observed even after controlling for political party affiliation and ideology, meaning that the effects weren't attributable to being Republican or conservative, but rather to the amount of exposure to Fox News. Pinna and colleagues also controlled for variables like total amount of TV watched and local COVID-19 rates. No significant effects were found for CNN or MSNBC.
In terms of how strongly people were influenced by Fox News, regression analyses allowed the researchers to estimate that every additional hour per week of watching Fox News during the study period would reduce the number of new vaccinations by 0.35 to 0.76 per 100 people. In other words, in every group of 10,000 people, watching one additional per hour of Fox News per week over a two month period predicts anywhere from 35 to 76 fewer people getting vaccinated.
Caveats
Although Pinna and colleagues were rigorous, there are two reasons for being cautious about their findings.
1. Indirect methods.
Ideally, a study like this would be prospective and focused on individuals. In other words, you'd track a large group of unvaccinated individuals over time, making note of their cable TV viewing habits, among other things, and whether or not they get vaccinated.
What the researchers did instead was to look back, retrospectively, at county-level data on these variables. Although the sample was large (2,750 counties from 47 states), it's a bit of a stretch to look at counties and generalize about individuals. What the results really indicate is something like this: The more time people in some county spend watching Fox News, the lower the vaccination rates in that county. This doesn't invalidate the findings. It just tells us that they're somewhat indirect, if, like the researchers, we wish to say something about how Fox influences individuals.
2. Third variable issues.
An alternative interpretation for the findings is that there's something about people who watch a lot of Fox News that makes them less inclined to get vaccinated. Maybe they're not very bright, for example. Or maybe they're more suspicious about social institutions like our health care system. If that's the case, then it's not Fox that causes them to forego vaccination. Rather, it was their lack of smarts, or their suspiciousness, that causes them to watch more Fox News and choose to be unvaccinated.
This way of looking at the results illustrates what's called a "third variable problem" (aka a "hidden variable" or "lurking variable" problem). When you find a correlation between two variables (e.g., Fox News consumption and vaccine status), it may turn out that these variables are causally unrelated, because some third variable (e.g., suspiciousness) accounts for the apparent correlation between them.
Given how this particular study was designed, the only way to address the third variable problem would've been to measure things like intelligence, suspiciousness, etc., and then show that they're unrelated to the two variables of interest (and/or control for any interrelationships). Even then, we couldn't be sure that we've ruled out all possible third variables.
We should also keep in mind that the extent of third-variable influence could range from all to nothing. Maybe the most suspicious people watch more Fox News and choose not to get vaccinated, in which case there's zero connection between watching Fox and vaccination status. But it's also possible for this to be true of some people, while for others, Fox News actually does influence their attitudes toward vaccination. So, I would conclude that if Fox indeed has such an influence, as the researchers claim, then we don't know how strong it is. I'm more inclined to trust the general patterns identified in the study than the specific estimate that each additional hour of watching Fox translates into 0.35 to 0.76 fewer vaccinated people out of 100.
Bottom line
My original question was whether the Fox Corporation has caused an increase in COVID-19 mortality rates. Here are my conclusions:
—Science journalism in Fox is generally weak.
—In their news reports, Fox isn't generally negative with respect to COVID-19 vaccines. Many reports speak positively and accurately about vaccine benefits, safety, and desirability. Negativity is more commonly observed around the politics of vaccination (e.g., vaccine mandates).
—In their opinion pieces, Fox writers, hosts, commentators, and guests often portray COVID-19 vaccines negatively, and promote disinformation with respect to vaccine effectiveness and safety.
—Republicans have lower vaccination rates and higher COVID-19 mortality rates than Democrats do, with the difference in mortality spiking after vaccines became available.
—Fox likely contributed to lower COVID-19 vaccination rates and greater mortality among Republicans. The specific extent of Fox's influence is unclear.
—The impact of Fox on COVID-19 vaccination and mortality rates among Republicans is more likely due to its opinion pieces than to its news.
Clearly, the title of this newsletter should've been something like "A news organization that kills Republicans?" And the answer I would give is: Yes, unfortunately, such an organization does appear to exist.
Postcript: Are there solutions?
If Fox Corporation is a public health hazard, as I'm suggesting here, then what can be done to counteract or prevent its negative effects?
This is a complicated question, so I'll just leave you with three brief suggestions.
1. Although I'd love to see universal standards for science journalism, and an agency, recognized by most lay people, that gives each news organization a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for its coverage, I suspect that none of this would affect how Fox does business. Their outlets already have a widespread reputation for unreliability. I suspect that any new authority that fails to support them would be treated the same way they treat their current critics – i.e., as biased, misguided liberals.
2. In a fascinating study currently in press, Fox News viewers were paid to switch to CNN for a month. By the end of the month, viewers had acquired knowledge that clashed with their prior political beliefs, and their attitudes were less polarized than before. Although the viewers mostly reverted to watching Fox again after the study ended, the results are promising in the sense of showing that mere exposure to alternative perspectives can sometimes help reduce partisanship. The trick of course is finding ways to persuade Fox audiences to try something new. Paying them isn't a realistic solution.
3. Media literacy is part of the K-12 curriculum, but arguably more is needed. Finding time for that, and delivering a message that won't offend people (e.g., those who admire Fox News), would be challenging, but I think it's a worthwhile venture, and not only for the future Republicans of America.
Thanks for reading!