Manually populating fields using SQL queries
Drupal acts a bit differently,

1) Can you try cleaning your cache.

2) Write a function in a custom module

function _get_nodes() {
  $options = array();
  $sql = "SELECT nid, type FROM {node}";
  //adjust the query to filter on content types, if needed
  $result = db_query($sql);
  foreach ($result as $row) {
    $node=node_load($row-&gt;nid);
    //dpm(node); maybe you have different naming convengion
    $node-&gt;field_global_news['und'][0]['value']=1;
    node_save($node);
    unset($node);
  }
  return $options;
 }