There have been plenty of “Fox News Sucks” threads and here is one more. They are, literally, making the pandemic worse. And not just in a “feels like it” sort of way but provably so.
They should be sued into oblivion and this study is a good start to build that case.
I am all for free speech but surely when you aid in the deaths of thousands maybe free speech should not be a protection.
How much does it add to the danger when people want to revoke the First Amendment based on surveys?
Regards,
Shodan
Viruses don’t read the constitution.
I think there are surveys and then there are surveys. A Buzzfeed online survey of whether women prefer men with beards is not on the same level as a University of Chicago survey on media effects as related to the coronavirus pandemic.
If you have issue with their methodology and results then certainly have at it. I think it will take more than a drive-by swipe to debunk this though.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post has predicted that more Republicans will die of coronavirus than Democrats.
So there.
Undoubtedly the final statistics will prove her right. :dubious:
We all know that the first amendment doesn’t cover telling “fire” in a crowded theater. We are now forced to answer a second question. When a wildfire is raging through our neighborhood, should free speech allow one to stand up and declare, “there is no fire, the fire is a government conspiracy to discredit our president, and everyone should go outside and pile up wood and dry brush in their front lawn”?
The link in the OP is not a prediction.
You get that these are different things right?
From the study: “we employ an instrumental variable approach that shifts relative viewership of the two shows, yet is plausibly orthogonal to local preferences for the two shows and to any other county-level characteristics that might affect the virus’ spread. In particular, we predict this difference in viewership using the product of i) the predicted fraction of TVs on during the start time of Hannity (leaving out Fox News) and ii) the local market share of Fox News from 2018, leaving out Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight. To generate cleaner variation in the first term of the interaction, we exploit cross-county variation in local sunset times, which predicts the likelihood that people turn their TV on at different points in the evening. The idea is simple: if people like to turn on their TVs to watch something when Hannity happens to be on instead of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the likelihood that viewers are shifted to watch Hannity is disproportionately large in areas where Fox News is popular in general.”
Sorry, this has to be a disguised Onion article.
Sounds to me like Carlson is going to have something to take with him when he asks for a raise at his next contract renegotiation…
Look, I am as appalled at the damage Alt-News has done to the concept of an informed citizenry as anyone else, but we all know the Fox content creators DO have the right to raise free speech/freedom of the press as a defense if someone seeks to sue them for the consequences of their words, it’s up to the court to rule on whether this applies.
And that said, the First Amendment has never been an absolute “just say the magic word” shield (there have always been greater or lesser provisions about incitation or obscenity or libel or exposure of secrets) so if someone wants to try and prove that Fox or their spokesmen deliberately published what they knew was false, for the purpose of disrupting public safety policy with either malice or reckless disregard inolved, I won’t mind seeing them having to go through the trouble of defending and justifying themselves. They wouldn’t be the first ones and they will not be the last ones.
And do bear in mind the ruling may well be in their favor.
You’re one of those people who says since evolution is only a “theory” it is wrong aren’t you?
I think there is a qualitative difference between a Jennifer Rubin prediction and this study’s use of “prediction.”
That’s not how pandemics work. If Republicans are ignoring the quarantine and running around spreading the virus, that will raise infection rates among the population as a whole, not just among Republicans. The virus doesnt care what your political views are. If we were totally segregated into red and blue states, that would be one thing, but in truth everywhere is just shades of purple and there are right-wing idiots spreading germs all over the liberal bastion of California, for example.
In Statistics, we examine data to determine whether a variable has an impact on another variable. First, we make a prediction: if X, then Y. Thats how the word “predict” is being used here – a prediction of what we will see when we examine the data, not a prediction of the future. In this case, the authors of the study want to see if there is a correlation between whether you watch Hannity or Tuxker Carlson and whether you are following the stay at home guidelines. However, simply putting out a survey that asks whether you watch Carlson or Hannity has all sorts of selection bias issues. So instead, they won’t re using a correlated variable which they predict (theres that word again, meaning something new!) correlates to being a Hannity fan or a Carlson fan – when does a household turn on their TV?
Of course, there may be confounding variables. For example, if most people turn their sets on at sunset, and Hannity comes on at sunset in a certain area, that’s a potential source of a false positive correlation. So they account for this possibility, which we have various tools to do in Statistics.
Once we measure how strongly correlated our variable is with our outcome, we again use statistics to determine, how likely is it that this apparent correlation would appear purely by random chance, with no underlying cause? The stronger the correlation, the less likely it happened by chance.
These methods do work. Our entire modern economy is built around these kinds of statistical analyses. So hopefully now you’re a little clearer about the meaning of “predict” in this context and can distinguish between a scholarly study and an Onion article 
Yes, because Citizens United made companies “people” as regards constitutional protections and there is no shortage of opinion out there on how bad of a decision that was.
As the law stands today you are 100% correct.
I am arguing that should be changed.
IIRC newspapers and other media and their staff had 1st Amendment freedom of press protection *before *Citizens United.
Yes and as soon as Hannity loses his show, we should do an investigation into any newspaper or tv network that criticized Trump for ending travel from China and shut them down too. The world is too dangerous to allow people to air unapproved opinions.
New York state went for Hillary in 2016. New York state was hit harder by COVID-19 than most other states. Therefore, we should make it illegal to vote.
Regards,
Shodan
There’s actually a serious issue underlying this joke.
Democracy gave us an incompetent narcissist for a leader at a time of when competence and effective bipartisan leadership are paramount. Our tradition of Constitutional rights makes it more difficult to implement the strict policies that may be required to control the pandemic. This are not circumstances when our social traditions of democracy and freedom are producing a good outcome.
On a purely pragmatic level, assuming equal resources, the social systems best equipped to deal with this pandemic (other things being equal) are probably authoritarian regimes like China and societies that place high value on cooperation and social cohesion like Japan. I think Europe is generally somewhere in the middle; but that the U.S. social system is the worst.
Of course I’m not suggesting that we tear up the Constitution. But these circumstances should certainly give us pause, and make us realize that our social system with the prevailing interpretation of Constitutional rights and freedoms may well cost hundreds of thousands of lives in these circumstances. We may decide that’s a price worth paying, but I certainly think it should be discussed.
Fox news is not 100% protected by the Bill of Rights. It is broadcast, and thus comes under FCC regulations.
The FCC could revoke their license or fine them.
It’s almost like you did not read the link in the OP.
No, that was part of US law since 1986- Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), and part of common law since the Roman republic. It was part of English common law for centuries.
Here is what Citizens United did: (wiki) In a majority opinion joined by four other justices, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy held that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act’s prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. ….Justice Kennedy’s opinion also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, the BCRA restrictions improperly allowed Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs…The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation’s ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.