George Gerbner

"The man who counts the killings"

A young hero & poet

Three years after emigrating from Hungary, he joined the United States Army in 1942 and served in World War II at the age of 23. He volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services which was a wartime intelligence agency, a predecessor of the CIA, where he ended up in group of fifteen men trained in techniques of blowing up bridges and roads.

They eventually parachuted behind enemy lines, under heavy fire over Slovenia. Gerbner personally identified and arrested the fascist Hungarian Prime Minister, who was subsequently executed. He earned a Bronze Star award.


Why the world will remember him

"A researcher who studied violence on television and how it shapes perceptions of society."

In 1964, he built a curriculum and a faculty from scratch at University of Pennsylvania. Gerbner wrote the first-ever master's thesis on the subject of education and television, and began a long career in academia studying the effects of television on its viewers. His mission was to awaken television viewers from their stupefaction.

He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content and how those changes affect viewer's perceptions of the world. Its database has information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters.

Television, Gerbner believed, is a modern-day religion. In 1990, He founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media. Gerbner said people no longer learned their cultural identity from their family, schools, churches and communities but instead from "a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell."

He coined the phrase mean world syndrome, a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place!

What this means is that if you are growing up in a home where there is more than say three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world - and act accordingly - than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television. The programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. There is a pervasive sense of insecurity and vulnerability.

His surveys tell us that the more television people watch, the more they are likely to be afraid to go out on the street in their own community. This conclusion is similar to the documentary's Bowling for Columbine, created by Michael Moore which describes Highschool masacre commited by two boys killing 12 students and 1 teacher. His discovery, based on worldwide statistics for gun possessions and violence rates, was that not a gun ownership produces violence but a culture of fear created by the government and the media generates a fear that leads Americans to arm themselves.

Gerbner's team found out that for every 10 violent characters on television there are about 11 victims; that's basically a tooth for a tooth. But for every 10 women who exert that kind of power - because violence is a kind of power - there are 16 women victims, of young women there are 17; of women of color there are 22.

On the average, there are more than five violent scenes in an hour of prime time, and five murders a night. There are twenty-five violent acts an hour in Saturday-morning cartoons - the programs most watched by children, usually without any supervision.


Children

When his child subjects reached their thirties, he discovered that those who had watched the most television violence at age eight inflicted more violent punishments on their children, were convicted of more serious crimes, and were reported more aggressive by their spouses than those who had watched less violent television.

By the reckoning of the Cultural Indicators project, the average American child will have witnessed more than 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on television by the time he or she leaves elementary school.

Another study, published in theJournal of the American Medical Association in 1992, found that the typical American child spends twenty-seven hours a week watching television and will witness 40,000 murders and 200,000 other violent acts by the age of eighteen.



Behind the scenes

Television violence is not simple acts but rather "a complex social scenario of power and victimization." The media keep focusing on the amount of violence. But concentrating on that reinforces the message of violence. It concentrates on the law-and-order aspect of violence. Harping on this all the time makes people more fearful -- which is the purpose of violence to begin with.
 
This has enormous political fallout. It's impossible to run an election campaign without advocating more jails, harsher punishment, more executions, all the things that have never worked to reduce crime but have always worked to get votes. It's driven largely, although not exclusively, by television-cultivated insecurity.
 
Heavy viewers believe the world to be much more dangerous than do light viewers. Thus heavy viewers tend to favor more law-and-order measures: capital punishment, three-strikes prison sentencing, the building of new prisons, and so forth. Politicians exploit this violence-cultivated sensibility by couching their favored policies in militaristic terms: the War on Crime, for example, or the War on Drugs.
 

Gerbner said: "The disempowering effects of television lead to neofascism. That kind of thing is waiting in the wings. Nazi Germany came on the heels of a basic sense of insecurity and powerlessness like we have here now. I don't want to oversimplify, but that is the direction we might be heading."

What to do

There is one thing needed to be said. There is nobody to blame. The whole mechanism is forced and driven by the existing system of global marketing. Its rules are set and it is just matter of time it will shape society.

Of course, in case there are no restrictions made to system. For example, in France there is a tax on theater admissions and video tape, which funds loans for independent production, magazines, newspapers, and television programs and motion pictures. In some Scandinavian countries, there is a law that requires government to support opposition newspapers.

So what should we do to prevent our stupefaction? Be aware of three principles of media literacy:

1. Identify the techniques used to create the "reality" of the image. There could be nothing real in television nowadays.
2. Second, understand that the media are businesses with commerical interests. Ask yourself how the program is tailored to increase profits?
3. Third, recognize the ideologies and values that images and techniques project.

Sources
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2881

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC38/Gerbner.htm
 
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97may/gerbner.htm