Vegetables or Candy?

When you ask people what is important to eat, they'll tell you vegetables.  When you quietly watch, they'll mostly eat candy.  It turns out the same is true of news.  The launching board for our conversation is a new study showing that while people consistently rank news coverage of international news, business and politics as being most important to their lives, an analysis of their online behavior tells a different story.  The study sparked this recent article in The Atlantic.  Host Ben Kieffer talks with Dennis Chamberlin, Associate Professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, Frank Durham, Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of Iowa and Doug Gentile, Associate Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University.  They discuss why readers say they want one thing, and demonstrate they want something else, and whether reading hard news coverage is like eating your vegetables.