The role of the media as a source of reliable health information during the COVID-19 pandemic has come under intense scrutiny, with claims of misinformation and partisanship coming from all sides of the political divide. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between exposure to biased media outlets and the likelihood of testing positive for COVID-19 in the USA. I use detailed household data extracted from the 2020 American National Election Study in order to gauge media consumption patterns, coupled with data on media bias scores for different outlets and programmes. I combine these variables to compute media bias exposure values for each respondent, and relate these to the likelihood of a positive COVID-19 test within each respondent’s household, controlling for a variety of other factors including partisanship, social media use, trust in the media and several socioeconomic and demographic variables. The results indicate that media bias exposure is significantly related to COVID-19 incidence, and in particular the coefficients show that a 1% increase in exposure to left-wing media is associated with a 0.2% decrease in the probability of a positive COVID-19 test. Conversely, I find no significant relationship between right-wing media exposure and COVID-19 infection rates. I also find a significantly higher likelihood of contracting COVID-19 among low socioeconomic status households, suggesting a disproportionate impact of the pandemic on such cohorts. These findings are robust to a number of tests, and emphasise the importance of aligning media messages with those advocated by leading medical experts during public health crises. Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available.

中文翻译：

---

美国媒体偏见曝光和 COVID-19 的发生率

在 COVID-19 大流行期间，媒体作为可靠健康信息来源的作用受到了严格审查，政治分歧的各个方面都声称存在错误信息和党派偏见。本文旨在了解在美国接触有偏见的媒体与 COVID-19 检测呈阳性的可能性之间的关系。我使用从 2020 年美国全国选举研究中提取的详细家庭数据来衡量媒体消费模式，以及不同媒体和节目的媒体偏见得分数据。我结合这些变量来计算每个受访者的媒体偏见暴露值，并将这些与每个受访者家庭中 COVID-19 测试呈阳性的可能性联系起来，控制了各种其他因素，包括党派偏见、社交媒体使用、信任媒体和几个社会经济和人口变量。结果表明，媒体偏见暴露与 COVID-19 发病率显着相关，特别是系数显示，左翼媒体暴露增加 1% 与 COVID-19 阳性概率降低 0.2% 相关测试。相反，我发现右翼媒体曝光与 COVID-19 感染率之间没有显着关系。我还发现社会经济地位低的家庭感染 COVID-19 的可能性要高得多，这表明大流行对此类人群的影响不成比例。这些发现对许多测试来说都是可靠的，并强调了在公共卫生危机期间将媒体信息与领先医学专家所倡导的信息保持一致的重要性。