Your media consumption habits say a lot about your COVID-19 knowledge

[Andy Meek]

• Americans who watch a lot of Fox News and who are heavy users of social media tend to have a warped understanding of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study.
• The study highlights the responsibility that media outlets have in terms of sharing reliable, authoritative information that people need in order to keep themselves safe from COVID-19.
• This comes as the number of coronavirus cases in the US since the pandemic began is now close to 15 million.

One of the most extraordinary things about the coronavirus pandemic this year is how much of a shared experience it's been, and how much of a collective experience this has entailed no matter where you look in the US or the world, for that matter. Previous national crises -- take something like the 9/11 terror attacks, for example. All of us, especially when we visit an airport, have felt some degree of the ripple effects from that 2001 tragedy, even though the people who experienced the attacks firsthand were confined to a specific locality in the US.

The coronavirus pandemic is an order of magnitude different, with all of us more or less experiencing versions of the same thing. Moreover, we all follow what's happening in real-time through the prism of the news media -- although, here's where we all begin to diverge. Because our baseline understanding of what's going on can be vastly different depending on whether we're talking about Fox News viewers compared to CNN and MSNBC audiences, for example.

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Your media consumption habits say a lot about your COVID-19 knowledge originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 7 Dec 2020 at 16:45:41 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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