If you get your news from headlines on your cellphone, or even mainstream media, the view of humanity presented can seem overwhelmingly negative. The Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at University of California Berkeley is launching a counteroffensive: “Spreading Love Through the Media,” a content creation and regranting initiative that will support compelling journalism and social media projects about human goodness. This effort will drive new content for GGSC’s own site and support journalists and new media creators focused on stories about the transformative power of love — romantic love, but also parental love, love for strangers and love for humankind. It aims to counterbalance the glut of media dishing out endless stories about war, division and authoritarianism — and in doing so, encourage a cultural shift toward more empathy and connection.
The John Templeton Foundation made a three-year grant for the project, which includes money to hire a journalist to run it and create stories for GGSC’s website, and $450,000 earmarked to support grantees. Additional funding from Acton Family Giving and Unlikely Collaborators, a company devoted to helping people resolve internal conflicts, will help cover things like scientific advisors paired with grantees and travel for grantees to attend events.
“We have been deeply invested in promoting social connection and care and compassion, not just within communities but also across group lines,” said Jason Marsh, GGSC’s executive director. “In recent years, we’ve been especially focused on the science of bridging differences, what science can teach us about why and how to foster relationships across differences. That work has felt increasingly urgent.”
Marsh, who conceived of the project and wrote the grant proposals, said it grew out of conversations with the John Templeton Foundation. The funder had previously supported a similar initiative focused on intellectual humility, an emerging area of research about navigating different perspectives and appreciating the limits of one’s own knowledge and beliefs. For that project, Templeton supported content creation and grants to 19 media producers, who exceeded the team’s expectations in terms of quality and extent and diversity of reach, said Marsh. “We came back to Templeton, excited to build on that model on a different topic. Talking to them, our shared interest in love really emerged — the effort to promote a deep sense of care and investment in other people’s wellbeing. The idea was to elevate the role and importance of love at a time of fragmentation and isolation. Love felt like a compelling concept that really speaks to different audiences.”
Yes, journalists want to write about love, it turns out
After GGSC announced the project, more than 1,300 people and organizations applied. Twelve internal and 25 external reviewers whittled down the pool of applicants through four rounds of reviews. They finally chose 23 winners, each of whom will receive between $5,000 and $50,000 to report and produce stories on a wide range of topics related to love. Stories will be shared through a variety of media outlets over the next 18 months.
“We wanted a truly diverse group. Some were more novel ideas and more speculative and some were more of a sure bet and had a big publisher attached,” said Katherine Lewis, the journalist who was hired to be the special projects editor for the science of love initiative and run the 18-month cohort program.
Winners include Gabriel Gaurano, who will produce a documentary following seven fathers who express paternal love through everyday routines. Boston Globe Media will create a Boston Globe Love Letters podcast season and editorial series, called “All Kinds of Love,” using personal narrative and expert interviews to explore “the range of love that humans can experience and how they find it.” Carla Colomé will profile Father Fabián, a pastor in Manhattan who became the legal guardian of more than 200 underage recent migrants to the United States, for El País. Jessica Chomik-Morales will produce a nine-part, audio-only podcast series, hosted by Scientific American, exploring what love is from a scientific perspective.
“A lot of these are challenging stories, not uncritical kisses and roses and puppies,” said Lewis, who ran the grant application, review and selection process, and who develops and writes articles on love for Greater Good magazine and will produce a series of videos for GGSC. “Love is also an action and commitment to look with clear eyes and see with truth the reality of another person and situation. That comes with the seeds of possible change and having an impact that makes things better.”
Theory of change: positive stories create positive action
GGSC has long championed the notion that our narratives influence our behavior and that positive stories promote prosocial behavior. There is plenty of research to back up this claim. Still, it’s hard to produce exact metrics on how much more loving a reader might become.
“We want people to reexamine their capacity for love, who they think is worthy of it, their ability to express love, and their assumptions about the limits on their own behavior and attitudes,” said Marsh. “Measuring that is really difficult, of course. That’s true for a lot of our work and a lot of media. So we’re really grateful for the trust and support of the John Templeton Foundation and the other foundations and their belief that we can change how people actually act over the long term and their understanding of love and beliefs.”
“Spreading Love through Media” sits within the growing subfields of solutions-oriented journalism and advocacy journalism. It’s also part of a movement supported by philanthropy to address social problems through narrative change, which includes the Reframing Aging Movement and other efforts to use writing to create positive emotional change, such as Principal Foundation’s “Money Chronicles” story initiative.
“I see much more conversation about asset framing, particularly at community newspapers, and more news organizations thinking about this as a way to make change and connect with audiences who are turned off by all the negative news,” said Lewis, who is the founder of the Institute for Independent Journalists and has contributed to outlets including The Atlantic, Fortune, the New York Times, Undark and the Washington Post. “I see a lot of news organizations saying, ‘You can’t write about a problem without having a solution.’ We have received questions from other news organizations about how we did this. I think the growth of movement and advocacy journalism shows that more journalists are thinking about this and about having an impact.”
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Other organizations interested in launching similar projects could take a page from GGSC in terms of partnering with journalists embedded in or freelancing for established news organizations and posting content themselves, said Lewis. “We have our own channels. We understand editorial, print and audio and video and we have relationships with other media organizations. My advice would be to build those kinds of connections. Having that platform helps minimize the risk for funders, as does having a collaborative rather than competitive approach.”
It is very common to blame media and social media for extremist beliefs, “toxic masculinity” and even violent acts. But does that mean the inverse is true? Can stories about fatherly love and activist fathers really have the same impact, but in a positive way? “There are a confluence of factors that can contribute to violent or aggressive behavior,” said Marsh.
“There is research showing that when people are exposed to positive media, that can have an impact. We have tried to elevate through our almost 25 years of existence this narrative about human assumptions and who we are as a species, challenging the idea that we’re naturally aggressive and violent and selfish. Instead, showing that we have these deep capacities for caring and connection,” said Marsh. “Our beliefs help dictate our behavior.”
