Watching Sean Hannity Is Worse Than Smoking Three Packs a Day

You’ve probably already heard the news that watching Sean Hannity is dangerous to your health, but you want to see the chart, don’t you? Here it is:

This is from “Misinformation During a Pandemic,” and it shows the increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths in counties that had high viewership levels of Sean Hannity’s show—where he pooh-poohed the danger of the pandemic—compared to Tucker Carlson’s show—where he told people to take the pandemic seriously. The Hannity viewers took his advice, and a lot of them ended up dead as a result:

Our estimates imply that a one standard deviation greater viewership difference is associated with 2 percent more deaths on March 21, 5 percent more deaths on March 28, and 8 percent more deaths on April 8, and 10 percent more deaths on April 11.

Of course, Hannity is small potatoes compared to the big kahuna, Donald Trump. I wonder how many people he’s killing every day?

GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

payment methods

GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate