George Gerbner, 86 - LA Times Obituary
Bob Feigel
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gerbner29dec29,1,7018323.story?coll=la-news-obituaries
From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
George Gerbner, 86; Educator Researched the Influence of TV Viewing on
Perceptions
By Myrna Oliver - Los Angeles 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 Office of Strategic Services, parachuting behind enemy lines
and earning a Bronze Star. After the war he worked as a freelance
writer and publicist and taught journalism at El Camino College while
earning a master's and doctorate in communications at USC.
He taught and conducted research at the Institute for Communications
Research at the University of Illinois from 1956 until 1964, when he
was recruited for the post at Penn. In recent years he taught at
several institutions, including American, Temple and Villanova
universities.
Gerbner, whose wife of 59 years, Ilona, died Dec. 8, is survived by
two sons, John and Thomas, and five grandchildren.
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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