True.
Sad thing is... the source of news influences their view. MSNBC or CNN viewers are more likely to take it serious. FOX viewers not so much.
What you reference is indeed happening.
To add to your point...
MSNBC or CNN coverage pretty much mirrors coverage on Canada’s networks.
Consistent messages around hand washing, distancing, quarantine, masks, etc.
In Canada, while media outlets lean in various political directions when it comes to their analysts... they generally accept facts as facts. And that’s what we get.
In the US, at least with FOX, facts either don’t get reported or they present misinformation.
I’m not offering opinion here. This has been studied and it totally supports your position.
This is a peer reviewed study that was referenced in the Washington Post:
In April, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign published a peer-reviewed study examining how Americans’ media diets affected their beliefs about the coronavirus.
Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection.
But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exaggerated the pandemic’s threat “to damage the Trump presidency“