George Gerbner

Cultivation Analysis: An Overview

If future historians wanted to know about the common cultural environment of stories and images into which a child was born in the second half of the 20th century, where would they turn? How would they describe its action structure, thematic content, and representation of people? How would they trace the ebb and flow of its currents? Pathetic to say, they would find no other source than our own Cultural Indicators database and reports.

Cultural Indicators: The Case of Violence in Television Drama

The cultural transformation of our time stems from the extension of the industrial-technological revolution into the sphere of message-production. The mass production and rapid distribution of messages create new symbolic environments that reflect the structure and functions of the institutions that transmit them. These institutional processes of the mass-production messages short-circuit other networks of social communication and superimpose their own forms of collective consciousness—their own publics—upon other social relationships. The consequences for the quality of life, for the cultivation of human tendencies and outlooks, and for the governing of societies, are far-reaching. Informed policy-making and the valid interpretation of social behavior require systematic indicators of the prevailing climate of the changing symbolic environment. A central aspect of cultural indicators would be the periodic analysis of trends in the composition and structure of message systems cultivating conceptions of life relevant to socialization and public policy. Findings of studies of the portrayal of violence in network television drama illustrate the terms of such analysis, and demonstrate the need for more comprehensive, cumulative, and comparative information on mass-cultural trends and configurations.

Triumph of the image : the media's war in the Persian Gulf : a global perspective

Image And Reality * A Third-World War: A Political Economy of the Persian Gulf War and the New World Order Andre Gunder Frank. * Manipulating Hearts and Minds Herbert I. Schiller. * Roots of War: The Long Road of Intervention Hamid Mowlana. * The Media and the War: What War? Noam Chomsky. Many Nations, One Image * The New World Odour: * The Indian Experience P. Sainath. * The State, the Malaysian Press, and the War in West Asia Zaharom Nain. * A Sense of Kenbei in JapanJapanese Position in the War and Regional Issues Masanori Naito. * Japanese Media and the War, Interview with Tetsuo Kogawa * The War Close to Home: The Turkish Media Haluk Sahin. * The Iranian Press and the Persian Gulf War: The Impact of Western News Agencies Kazem Motamed-Nejad, Naiim Badii, and Mehdi Mohsenian-Rad. * Western Media: Guilty Until Proved Innocent Khawla Mattar. * War Reporting: Collateral Damage in the European Theater Farrel Corcoran. * Ruling by Pooling Stig A. Nohrstedt. * Innovations of Moral Policy Heikki Luostarinen. * Truth: The First Victim of War? Rune Ottosen. * Public Opinion and Media War Coverage in Britain Martin Shaw and Roy Carr-Hill. * A Soviet Snapshot Eugeni Mikitenko. * Coverage of the Gulf War by the Spanish and Catalonian Media Hctor Borrat. * The War as Telenovela Omar Souki Oliveira. * A Sampling of Editorial Responses from the Middle Eastern Press on the Persian Gulf Crisis H. Mowlana, with Danielle Vierling and Amy Tully. Coming Back To Reality * Twisting the U.NCharter to U.S. Ends Richard A. Falk. * CNN: Elites Talking to Elites Richard C. Vincent. * Exterminating Angels: Morality, Violence, and Technology in the Gulf War Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins. * Back to the Future Kamel S. Abu Jaber. * More Viewing, Less Knowledge Michael Morgan, Justin Lewis, and Sut Jhally. * Joysticks, Manhood, and George Bushs Horse Rami G. Khouri. * Clusters of Reality Bombed into Bold Relief Erskine B. Childers. * Dangers of the Cultural Invasion? Mostafa Mahmoud. * Persian Gulf War, the Movie George Gerbner. *

The stories we tell

Most of what we know, or think we know, we have never personally experienced. We live in a world erected by stories. Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, ...

Television Violence, Victimization, and Power

In the 30 years that we have lived with television, public concern with the medium’~g predilection for violence has been reflected in at least eight separate congressional hearings, a special report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in 1969, and a massive study of television and social behavior commissioned by the Surgeon General. In the years since 1972, the flow of research and debate has continued. While scientific caution requires us to proceed carefully, some conclusions can be drawn from the wealth of data and evidence that has been accumulated. First, violence is a frequent and consistent feature of television drama. In our research violence is defined as the overt expression of physical force compelling action against one’s will on pain of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing. Using this definition we have been analyzing a sample of prime time and weekend morning network dramatic television programs annual-

Ideological Perspectives and Political Tendencies in News Reporting

The basic editorial function is not performed through “editorials” but through the selection and treatment of all that is published. An earlier study on “Press Perspectives in World Communication” 1 indicated how this process of total selection and relative emphasis expresses and cultivates those aspects of national perspectives in world political communication which serve the industrial and social role of media in their own societies. The subject of the present inquiry is the related proposition that, in fact, all news are views; that all editorial choice patterns in what and what not to make public (and in what proportion, with what emphasis, etc.) have an ideological basis and a political dimension rooted in the structural characteristics of the medium; that such ideological perspectives and political tendencies will be expressed and cultivated through presumably non-political news as much as, or perhaps even more than, through overtly political reporting, and in the commercial press as well as in the “party press.” Our case study inquired into the cov-

Violence and terror in the mass media : an annotated bibliography

Preface Introduction Mass Media Content Mass Media Effects Pornography and the Media Terrorism and the Media Author Index Subject Index

Use of Alcohol, Illicit Drugs, and Tobacco Among Characters on Prime-Time Television

Previous research of addictive substances suggests that use of alcohol, illicit drugs, and tobacco is overrepresented on prime‐time television (TV). These studies, however, have relied on frequency counts of the substance, rather than the prevalence of use among characters. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to compare the prevalence of alcohol, illicit drug, and tobacco users among characters on prime‐time TV during 1995 and 1996 with rates of use in the United States. In addition, we determined if the ratio of male to female, young to old, and white to minority addictive substance users on prime‐time TV were similar to the equivalent U.S. ratios. Comparing results for prime‐time TV characters versus the U.S. population (respectively), 11.0% (99% CI, 9.8–12.1) drank alcohol versus 51.0%; 0.8% (99% CI, 0.5–1.1) used illicit drugs versus 6.1 %; and 2.5% (99% CI, 2.0–3.1) smoked tobacco versus 28.9%. In addition, no consistent pattern was evident in our analyses that assessed whether addictive substance users on prime‐time TV were more frequently represented as men, young, or minority compared to the similar U.S. ratio. These results indicate that contrary to prevailing beliefs, alcohol, illicit drug, and tobacco users are uncommon on prime‐time TV and are less prevalent than in the U.S. population.

The Social Role of the Confession Magazine

So, while never lacking in readers, the editorial formula attracted, from the beginning, persons who probably had never before read magazines, persons with little education or purchasing power, persons whom other publishers had neglected because they were not the sort that advertisers were especially interested in reaching. (10, pp. 275-276) In the course of time, blatant amateurishness changed into the fine art of creating the illusion of homely authenticity. But the target audience remained the same. And it remained for the postWorld War II marketing revolution to discover the commercial and social

Death in Prime Time: Notes on the Symbolic Functions of Dying in the Mass Media

The cultural (and media) significance of dying rests in the symbolic context in which representations of dying are embedded. An examination of that context of mostly violent representations suggests that portrayals of death and dying serve symbolic functions of social typing and control and tend, on the whole, to conceal the reality and inevitability of the event.