Gerbner, George (1919–2005)

George Gerbner was born in Hungary, emigrated to the United States in 1939, and became a U.S. citizen. He earned a BA degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 1942 and worked as a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle until enlisting in the Army during World War II.

After the war, he earned an MA in 1951 and his PhD in 1955 from the University of Southern California. In 1955, his dissertation, “Toward a General Theory of Communication,” was named “Best Dissertation.” He joined the faculty at the Institute for Communication Research at the University of Illinois in 1956.

Dr. Gerbner became professor of communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. He was awarded the only study funded as part of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence to analyze the content of television programs. This research was the beginning of the Cultural Indicators Project, which continued to receive funding from the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, the National Institute of Mental Health, and other agencies. It became the longest continuously running research project focused on television. Professor Gerbner served as dean of the Annenberg School until 1989, when he was named Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunications in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass Media at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1990 he founded the Cultural Environment Movement, a global coalition of organizations and activists devoted to changing media practices and policies. He served as the executive editor of the Journal of Communication for many years.

Professor Gerbner formulated a paradigm for understanding mass communication made up of three prongs: institutional process analysis, message system (content) analysis, and cultivation analysis. Cultivation analysis, an important theoretical perspective in communication, is based on the idea that the views and behaviors of those who spend more time with the media, particularly television, reflect what they've [Page 266]seen on television. Cultivation theory is a process focusing upon the commonality in what people think about or know and assesses television's contributions to viewers' conceptions of social reality.

Dr. Gerbner is best known for his studies of television violence. For more than 30 years, the Violence Profiles, created as part of the Cultural Indicators Project, provided a continuous and consistent monitoring of violence in primetime 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. Professor Gerbner often testified before Congress using the Violence Profiles to provide evidence that the amount of violence in primetime network programs changed very little from one television season to the next and had a decided effect upon the public's conceptions of violence in their lives and in society.

Professor Gerbner was a prolific writer. Two of his most important and seminal writings include his 1969 article in AV Communication Review, “Toward ‘Cultural Indicators’: The Analysis of Mass Mediated Message Systems,” and the 1976 Journal of Communication article (written with Larry Gross), “Living With Television: The Violence Profile.”

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