Fox news has been an extremely effective messaging arm of the Trump presidency. Some might say there would be no Trump presidency if not for Fox News. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has been a steady propaganda arm through Trump’s many screwups and foibles. Serving as a kind of alternative universe to the "mainstream media," Fox has gotten the president out of numerous jams and happily explained away his most incendiary statements. It even created a caravan of illegal immigrants marching its way toward the country's southern border right before the midterm elections, a caravan that then magically dissipated once the election was over. Some say that if Richard Nixon had Fox News in his corner he would never have needed to resign.

But few things have been harder to message—even for Trump's most loyal messenger—than the president's incredibly botched response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Propaganda and public health are a dangerous mix. The Spanish flu (which, despite its name, may actually have originated in the United States) was made considerably worse because the American government tried to censor coverage of it. As Walter Shapiro wrote in The New Republic last month, even though more than 195,000 Americans died in a single month in 1918, "President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with a war in Europe that would end on November 11, made no public references to the disease. And states received no assistance from Washington, not even from the Food and Drug Administration."

And just as Wilson had a supportive, complacent press ready to go along with his deceptions, so too does Trump, namely the host of a 9 p.m. nightly show on Fox News Channel. In fact, as Vox recently reported, a team of researchers concluded that viewers of Sean Hannity in the early weeks and months of the pandemic were more likely to be ignoring safe-distancing rules and to be putting themselves at heightened risk to coronavirus. The paper — from economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott — focused on Fox news programming in February and early March and compared the programming of Hannity to that of his 8 p.m. counterpart, Tucker Carlson, who was more directly sounding the alarm to his viewers. Using both a poll of Fox News viewers over age 55 and publicly available data on television-watching patterns, they concluded that "greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.” (Too bad they didn't include Laura Ingraham in that study!)