How does the media affect the values of children and adults?

The news cycle has gotten so short, and the commercial pressure on it so intense, that some people now describe modern media coverage as having a "disturbing" lack of morality. I think that's about right. When it comes to the things that actually matter morally, we've settled for brief, hot-topic exchanges. Minimum wage, social security, health care — the issues with real ethical weight rarely get the sustained attention they deserve.

The advent of "soundbites"

TV news squeezes complex stories into thirty seconds, maybe a minute. Where a real argument used to unfold, we now get a soundbite. And here's the thing that's easy to miss: media coverage has been shaped to fit around commercials, not the other way round. Advertisers get a lot of room to move in that arrangement. Stories that dwell on moral conflict tend to get pushed aside, simply because they distract from the ads.

So what fills the space instead? Often, stories with almost no substantive content at all. They grab attention. They don't inform. They don't spark real public discourse, and they don't touch the issues that actually press on people's lives. They do land an emotional punch, though — that's the one thing they're built for, delivered in short, dramatic bursts so as not to overwhelm anyone.

Oversimplifying morally relevant stories

Morally relevant stories get buried under sensationalism, even though plenty of people still hold on to values like justice and integrity and try to live by them. Take health care in Australia — people care about it deeply. The media has core issues here it needs to address and, by and large, isn't.

Demographic issues and technology costs

Health care costs keep rising, budgets keep tightening, and that squeeze threatens the sector's ability to look after an aging population. Technology has genuinely improved how we diagnose and manage serious illness — I don't want to undersell that. But the spread of that same technology comes with a price tag, and the financial limits it creates are real.

Medical and health care technology adds weight to state budgets. Maintaining people's health and wellbeing is hard enough already; improving it gets harder still.

The neglected moral dimension of healthcare

Most media coverage doesn't reflect what people actually value. There are a few reasons for that — sometimes it's simple lack of initiative, sometimes commercial interest just wins. Either way, the pressing issues get missed. Commercial news, by its nature, tends toward the superficial, and that skews how audiences understand the moral consequences of political action, or inaction.

Journalists need to spend more time in the debate on socially relevant issues. News should be tied back to the ethical and moral realities people are actually living, through coverage that's insightful and sustained — not a headline and gone.

Inequality and equity issues

Australian health outcomes, on the whole, have improved dramatically. Some groups now see lower mortality, longer life expectancy, better disease management. Notice the word "some." In Australia, Indigenous life expectancy sits well below non-Indigenous life expectancy — an official gap of around eight years, roughly 72 versus 81 for men and 76 versus 84 for women, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. And, unsurprisingly, the quality of medical care you get still tracks with income.

Values and social media

No look at media's effect on moral values can skip past how social media shapes our values and beliefs. Meta, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok — people of every age are on these platforms constantly, and a lot of parents feel real anxiety about what that's doing to their kids' values and moral development. Their worry, in short: that these platforms get in the way of healthy moral growth rather than support it.

A series of surveys backs up that worry, at least in parents' minds. In a 2016 Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues survey of UK parents, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter felt individual values were largely missing from their children's social media experience — self-control and forgiveness (24%), honesty (21%), fairness (20%), humility (18%). Negative traits told a different story: 60% of parents saw anger and hostility on display at least monthly, with arrogance (51%), ignorance (43%), and hatred (36%) reported a little less often, but still uncomfortably common.

The good and the bad

And yet. Parents who focus mostly on the negative still see some good in it. Just under 75% said they noticed one or more positive values expressed on social media every day — creativity, humor, love, an appreciation of beauty, courage.

That's not hard to explain, actually. Platforms like Meta and Twitter put you in contact with people from every part of the world, every walk of life. New situations, new perspectives. Different social groups, different religions, different cultures, all a scroll away. Being exposed to the unfamiliar like that can make people more tolerant, more understanding — it can genuinely widen empathy. It lets us see through someone else's eyes in a way we might never manage if we only met them face to face.

Empathy and social decisions

There's a documented link between social media use and narcissism. And social media use seems to work against good social decision-making, wearing down empathy through simple desensitization. The Jubilee Centre in the UK ran a project looking at exactly this — what social media does to value and character development, and whether there's any upside worth counting.

What they found: parents' attitudes skewed heavily negative. Around 40% were concerned that social media was actively harming their children's moral development. Only 15% thought it could support or enhance it.

The effect on adults

The same project also asked parents about their own social media habits. Regular users reported the same pattern — positive values felt largely absent, negative ones dominant. Which brings me back to empathy: exposure doesn't automatically produce it. Empathy is often exactly what's missing online, and the sheer scale of cyberbullying is the proof.

I think the real issue is baked into the nature of the internet itself. Anonymity, invisibility — people behave differently online than they would face to face. That creates a kind of dissonance: you can believe you hold good values and high morals while acting the opposite way online, quietly telling yourself you're not "that person." It's precisely that dissonance that fuels cyberbullying and behavior like it.

Closer together or farther apart?

Does social media bring us closer or push us further apart? Honestly, both. Friends and family who can't be together physically stay connected this way — that's real and valuable. But people who don't know each other tend to be more mistrustful online than they'd be meeting in person. Online dating is a good example of that tension.

Either way, social media has made most of us a bit more superficial. It's a space where you get to be whoever you want to be. One reason it's linked to depression is simple: everyone there looks so happy. Are they? Probably not, most of the time. Doesn't matter — the effect on the viewer is real regardless.

A fake somebody or a real nobody?

Social media lets us present ourselves as new, unique, special, quietly redefining our core values in the process. Younger people are especially vulnerable here, because becoming an Instagram or TikTok star feels genuinely within reach. It looks so easy. It isn't — in reality, only a tiny fraction of users ever get there. Current estimates suggest well under 1% reach even modest influencer status, and genuine mass fame is rarer still.

I can't point to one clean study here, but the broader research on youth self-presentation runs in a consistent direction: heavier social media use tends to correlate with placing more importance on appearance and entertainment — "having fun," "looking good" — while those who use it less often lean more toward naming honesty, or helping others.

Now, we can't pin value erosion entirely on social media — plenty of other factors are at play, and it's fair to ask whether shallower people are simply drawn to these platforms in the first place, rather than made shallow by them. Still, the strength of that correlation is startling. Researchers describe this "shallowing" effect as touching all kinds of people, across all kinds of values.

Deterring exploration

Here's something a lot of young people don't fully grasp: even a deleted screenshot, photo, or comment can live on somewhere. That permanence interferes with moral development in a specific way — it deters experimentation. Part of growing a moral sense is trying things, getting them wrong, changing your mind. Online, you often can't take anything back.

Instagram, being so photo-reliant, has an outsized pull on how young people see right and wrong. Seeing is believing, as the saying goes, and that's true even when what you're seeing is fake — a single doctored image can leave a lasting impression. Often the whole point of a social media photo is to produce a firm opinion in the viewer without any of the nuance that would normally earn it.

Visual primacy

Images carry what researchers call visual primacy — they hit harder than a status update or a tweet ever could. And there's a strange feedback loop: enough likes on a photo, and it starts to feel more credible. We begin treating it as reliable, as true. That's herd mentality at work, and not the good kind.

There's a related tendency, too: we assume something is true, or normal, until we're given a reason to doubt it. The more we see of something, the more standard it starts to feel. Given enough repetition, it can quietly reshape what we value.

Undermining values

Picture endless photos of underage drinking, everyone laughing, having a great time. That steadily undermines the idea that underage drinking is dangerous — because you never see the other side of it, the hangover, the crash. Social media has a way of convincing people that the beautiful, exciting moments on their feed are simply how life is meant to look. A single image can't capture the ordinary ups and downs of an actual day.

Worse, a photo creates the illusion of a tidy beginning, middle, and end to something that, in reality, was just one fake moment stretched to look like a whole story. That manufactured sense of "normal" can trap children who are chasing validation through attention.

The notion of subtlety

So what can parents actually do? People have been asking this for decades, and I don't think there's one clean answer. What helps is teaching kids to tell the real from the fake — not an easy job in a world of professionally doctored photos and heavily filtered images. And banning social media outright tends to backfire.

Here's the good news, though: the conversation with your child or teen doesn't need to be heavy to matter. If you don't know much about TikTok or Instagram, let them be the expert — that alone opens a door.

To bring in some subtlety, just ask questions. Sit with them, look at the pictures together. Ask what they think is real, what might be fake, and why. Parents have more of a voice here than they often believe they do.