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Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2005 07:55:37 -0500
From: Jay Ruby [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: Gerbner Obituary
From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
George Gerbner, 86; Educator Researched the
Influence of TV Viewing on Perceptions
By Myrna Oliver
Times Staff Writer
December 29, 2005
George Gerbner, an educator and pioneer
researcher into the influence of television
violence on viewers' perceptions of the world,
has died. He was 86.
Gerbner, the former dean of the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania, died Saturday at his home in
Philadelphia of unspecified causes.
Always interested in storytelling, the
Hungarian-born Gerbner became concerned as
television and motion pictures supplanted family
members and friends in relaying tales both true
and fictional.
By 2000, after more than three decades of study,
Gerbner told National Public Radio that he had
ceased to view television as a medium.
I call it a cultural environment into which our
children are born, and which tells all the
stories, he said. You know, who tells the
stories of a culture really governs human
behavior. It used to be the parent, the school,
the church, the community. Now it's a handful of
global conglomerates that have nothing to tell,
but a great deal to sell.
He said average homes had a television set turned
on at least seven hours a day, and that
youngsters were learning to read by watching
television commercials, developing a consumer
mentality.
During his 25-year tenure as dean in the Penn
communications school, which was funded by TV
Guide magnate Walter Annenberg, Gerbner received
numerous grants to study the portrayal of
violence on television and in films and also to
analyze how TV and films showcase particular
professions and demographic groups.
In 1968, he founded and headed the Cultural
Indicators Project to measure trends in
television content and examine how television
shapes Americans' concept of society.
The project's database has collected information
on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000
characters.
In the early 1990s, after leaving Penn, Gerbner
founded a second organization, the Cultural
Environment Movement, to work for greater
diversity in media ownership, employment and
representation.
Over 30 years of analysis, Gerbner said the level
of violence shown on television remained
relatively steady - six to eight incidents per
hour, and in children's programming up to 20 to
35 incidents per hour.
The most general and prevalent association with
television viewing, he testified to a
congressional subcommittee on communications in
1981, is a heightened sense of living in a 'mean
world' of violence and danger. Fearful people are
more dependent, more easily manipulated and
controlled, more susceptible to deceptively
simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line
postures . They may accept and even welcome
repression if it promises to relieve their
insecurities. That is the deeper problem of
violence-laden television.
Through his research, Gerbner concluded that
heavy television viewers (more than four hours
daily) came to consider the world as rightly
belonging to the power and money elite depicted
on the small screen - the young, wealthy white
males idealized in programming as heroic doctors
and other professionals.
He warned that women, minorities and the elderly,
from what they saw repeatedly on television,
would come to accept inferior status and
restricted opportunities as inevitable or even
deserved.
Depriving people of the chance to see themselves
with equal opportunities and potential, he told
The Times in 1993, has to be seen as an
indictment of civil rights, especially in a
medium that is licensed not just as a business
but as a public trustee.
Television programming, he said in speeches and
articles, relies on violence to demonstrate who
can get away with what against whom.
Gerbner, whose findings were regularly disputed
by network executives, said that neither V-chips
nor content-rating codes would prevent children
from viewing the ubiquitous television violence.
The educator was editor of the Journal of
Communication from 1974 to 1991 and chaired the
editorial board of the International Encyclopedia
of Communications for several years. He also
wrote, edited and contributed to several books
about communications and media.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Gerbner had a lifelong
interest in folklore and literature. He began his
studies at the University of Budapest before
fleeing fascist Hungary in 1939.
After arriving in Los Angeles, through the help
of his brother, film director Laszlo Benedek, he
studied at UCLA and then completed a journalism
degree at UC Berkeley. He worked briefly for the
San Francisco Chronicle as a writer, columnist
and assistant financial editor.
Gerbner served in the U.S. Army in Europe during
World War II, working with the
