Highlights

nalyze the content of 69,907 headlines pro-duced by four major global media corporations duringa minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In or-der to discover strategies that could be used to attractclicks, we extracted features from the text of the newsheadlines related to the sentiment polarity of the head-line. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline isstrongly related to the popularity of the news and alsowith the dynamics of the posted comments on that par-ticular news

. Furthermore, our results add to the growing body of literature documenting—at least at this historical moment—the link between extreme right-wing ideology and misinformation8,14,24 (although, of course, factors other than ideology are also associated with misinformation sharing, such as polarization25 and inattention17,37).

To begin with, the US output of RT tapped into the rich American culture of conspiracy theories by running a story entitled ‘911 questions to the US government about 9/11’

Instead, to counter US hegemonic narratives, the Kremlin took to systematically presenting alternative narratives and dissenting voices. Russia’s public diplomacy tool — the international television channel Russia Today — was rebranded as RT in 2009, probably to hide its clear links to the Russian government11. After an aggressive campaign to expand in English-, Spanish-, German- and French-speaking countries throughout the 2010s, the channel became the most visible source of Russia’s disinformation campaigns abroad. Analysis of its broadcasts shows the adoption of KGB approaches, as well as the use of novel tools provided by the global online environment

Effect of network viewership on weekly vaccination rates by age group, 2021 (2SLS). Coefficient plots with 95% CIs from 2SLS regressions showing the effect of one standard deviation changes in viewership on weekly vaccinations per 100 people, by age group. Viewerships are instrumented using the lineup channel positions. Regressions include demographic and cable-system controls. Standard errors are clustered by state.

Our results show that Fox News is reducing COVID-19 vaccination uptake in the United States, with no evidence of the other major networks having any effect. We first show that there is an association between areas with higher Fox News viewership and lower vaccinations, then provide an instrumental variable analysis to account for endogeneity, and help pin down the magnitude of the local average treatment effect.

Overall, an additional weekly hour of Fox News viewership for the average household accounts for a reduction of 0.35–0.76 weekly full vaccinations per 100 people during May and June 2021. This result is not only driven by Fox News’ anti-science messaging, but also by the network’s skeptic coverage of COVID-19 vaccinations.

There were no significant differences in levels of consumption and trust between the vaccine accepting and vaccine hesitant groups in the Irish sample. Compared to vaccine hesitant responders, vaccine resistant individuals consumed significantly less information about the pandemic from television and radio, and had significantly less trust in information disseminated from newspapers, television broadcasts, radio broadcasts, their doctor, other health care professionals, and government agencies.