I am a news addict. Is the news like values junk-food?

Every once in a while I am struck by what an odd habit it is to constantly check the news.  The daily media diet on which I feed seems to have very little good news.  I am regularly exposed to stories about war, racial violence, climate disaster, financial deceit, and child pornography – often several times a day.  It makes me wonder what kind of an impact this has on how I understand the world What does the news do to my values? 

 One idea that psychologists have contributed to this question comes from research that looks at what happens when values other than the ones we endorse are activated or “primed” in us.  Chilton and colleagues (2012) surveyed over 300 adults in the UK and selected those who scored in the top 10% on “extrinsic” values – values like image, popularity, and success.  The top 10%participants then did a brief writing exercise focusing on either the importance of things the already valued (image, wealth, popularity) or on the importance of pro-social values like being accepting and broad-minded.  After the writing task, the researchers interviewed them about social and ecological issues.  And they found something very interesting.  The people who really valued image but wrote about social issues endorsed highly pro-social ideas when they were interviewed after writing.  For example when asked about child mortality, one person who had written about social issues said, “It’s really unfair the injustice of how some people have loads and other people have absolutely nothing and yeah it’s terrible.”  So even those who care most about preserving their image, wealth and popularity can be “primed” to value other things.

It seems we can be primed to alter our values, even very strong ones.  I am not aware of any research that specifically looks at how the news activates (or fails to activate) our values.  But priming research does make me wonder if I am feeding myself a diet of values junk-food.  I have been looking for alternatives and have come upon places that focus on reporting good news – for example: http://abcnews.go.com/us/good_news ; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-news/ ). Maybe reading these sites is like priming myself to pay attention to what is good in the world.  What do you think?

Reference

Chilton, P, Crompton, T, Kasser, T. Maio, G., & Nolan, A (2012).  Communicating bigger-than-self problems to extrinsically oriented audiences.  Retrieved from http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/extrinsically_oriented_audiences1.pdf