I’ll say upfront, this is still undergoing peer review, so it’s not final. It’s a study comparing messaging by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and impacts on death rates.
As you might know, Carlson has been advocating for distancing and caution for quite a while, where Hannity has referred to it as a hoax. The authors concluded that the latter messaging actually led to more deaths.
I’ve only skimmed the article once, & I have to say I opened it think it was gonna be some stupid inferential study, but it turns out there’s much less inference than I guessed, since they went to actual viewers and quizzed them on their behaviors.
Editing because I kept typing it out and it would crash, so I’m doing it in smaller chunks: First, it’s hard to not make this political, would it be good if we could comment and not make it so. Second, some of the conclusion is obvious, but as I used to tell the modelers who worked for me, even an obvious conclusion is important because it provides actual scale/relative outcomes.