Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Chicago linked Fox News viewership with reduced compliance with states’ stay-at-home orders in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that a 1% increase in Fox News viewership in a zip code “reduces the propensity to stay at home by 8.9 percentage points compared to the pre-pandemic average.”

Though the study did not measure how much Fox News viewership affects their behavior, the researchers argue that the findings are the result of the network’s misleading attempts to downplay the threat posed by the virus in early March.

“We show that exposure to Fox News has led to substantially lower compliance with social distancing regulations,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrey Simonov, a professor at Columbia Business School.

The researchers used a “quasi-experimental” method, using social distancing data aggregated by the geospatial data firm SafeGraph. The company, which collected 45 million anonymized GPS pings from 45 anonymized mobile devices, uses […]