George Gerbner

George Gerbner (born August 8, 1919, Budapest, Hungary—died December 24, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) was a Hungarian-born American journalist known for his research into television content and the development of cultivation theory, which posits that stories told by a culture and its media form the foundation of that culture.

At an early age, Gerbner developed a keen interest in the songs, stories, and folklore of his native country. After winning first place in a Hungarian literature competition in high school, he enrolled in the University of Budapest only to flee to Paris in 1939 to avoid being conscripted into the Hungarian army. He went to the United States later that year and began his collegiate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. After a short stint working as a newspaper reporter and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, Gerbner enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 and operated with Austrian and Slovenian resistance groups during World War II. Shortly after the war ended, he helped capture and arrest pro-German Hungarian Prime Minister Döme Sztójay on war crimes charges.

After the war Gerbner enrolled at the University of Southern California for graduate studies, completing a master’s degree in education in 1951 and a Ph.D. in communications in 1955. He joined the faculty at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1956 before becoming a professor of communication and the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1964. Gerbner relinquished his deanship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, but he continued to teach there until 1994. He became the Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunications in the department of broadcasting, telecommunications, and mass media at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1997.

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In 1973 Gerbner formulated a paradigm for understanding mass communication. The paradigm was made up of three prongs: institutional process analysis, message system (content) analysis, and cultivation analysis. Cultivation analysis (or cultivation theory), an important theoretical perspective in communication, is based on the idea that the views and behaviours of those who spend more time with the media, particularly television, internalize and reflect what they have seen on television. Cultivation theory focuses upon the commonality in what people think about or know and assesses television’s contributions to viewers’ conceptions of social reality.

Gerbner developed the television violence profile in 1967. That tool was created as part of the Cultural Indicators Project, which holds a database that spans more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters, to assist in providing continuous and consistent monitoring of violence in prime-time network broadcast programming. Violence was studied as a demonstration of power, examining the demographic profiles of who gets hurt and who does the hurting and focusing upon its long-term consequences for both thinking and action. Gerbner often testified before Congress, using the violence profiles to provide evidence showing that the amount of violence in prime-time network programs changed very little from one television season to the next. He also noted that television violence influenced the public’s conceptions of violence in their lives and in society, making them more fearful and helping them to develop what he called “mean world syndrome,” the belief that the world is more violent and brutal than it really is.