Tuesday, July 31, 2012

George Gerbner - Media Violence Researcher


January 3, 2006

George Gerbner, 86, Researcher Who Studied Violence on TV, Is Dead

PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 2 (AP) - George Gerbner, a researcher who for decades studied violence on television and how it shapes perceptions of society, died on Dec. 24 at his home here. He was 86.
The cause was cancer, his daughter-in-law Kathie McDermott said.
Mr. Gerbner, who was dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, studied television for more than three decades.
He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content and how those changes affect viewers' perceptions of the world. Its database has information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters.
Mr. 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.
"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures," he testified before a Congressional subcommittee on communications in 1981. "They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities. That is the deeper problem of violence-laden television."
Born in Budapest in 1919, Mr. Gerbner intended to study folklore at the University of Budapest but was forced to flee fascist Hungary in 1939.
With the help of his brother, the filmmaker Laszlo Benedek, he came to the United States. Mr. Gerbner graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a journalism degree and worked briefly at The San Francisco Chronicle.
He joined the United States Army in 1942 and served in World War II.
Mr. Gerbner worked as a professor and researcher at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois from 1956 until 1964, when he accepted a position at Penn. After leaving Penn in 1990, he founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media.
He taught at Temple University and Villanova University.
Mr. Gerbner is survived by two sons, John and Thomas, and five grandchildren. His wife of 59 years, Ilona, died Dec. 8.