Page 265 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 255
what is right’ (Gerbner et al, 1979, p. 179). Their work, the validity of which is
hotly debated, is especially interesting for proposing a way to test the hypothesis
that important political influences can stem from messages that in themselves are
not in a narrow or conventional sense ‘political’.
The Gerbner thesis rests on four main assumptions (each of which is likely to
be challenged by critics of this controversial point of view). One is that in
modern society people are becoming more and more dependent on vicarious
sources of experience: ‘the fabric of popular culture that relates elements of
existence to each other and structures the common consciousness…is now
largely a manufactured product’, purveyed through mass communications
(Gerbner, 1972, p. 37). Second, it is alleged that television, a mass medium
which penetrates all sectors of society, projects a view of the world through
repetitive and pervasive patterns that are in themselves organically interrelated
and internally consistent. Third, viewers tend to absorb the meanings embedded
in this fabric, because they use the medium ‘largely non-selectively and by the
clock rather than by the program’ (Gerbner, Gross, Signorielli, Morgan and
Jackson-Beeck, 1979, p. 180). A fourth assumption points more directly to the
way in which these ideas have so far mainly been tested. This is that ‘violence
plays a key role in TV’s portrayal of the social order’—an assumption,
incidentally, which illustrates this group’s concern with all forms of programme
output and not just informational broadcasting.
The Annenberg research strategy depends on the fact that TV portrayals of
social reality are in some respects distorted or exaggerated. Content analysis can
show, for example, that characters in television drama are more likely to
encounter personal violence than will the average man in the street, and that
murder is a more common crime in programme plots (relative to other offences)
than in real life. The Annenberg researchers have accordingly asked surveyed
sample members to say which of two different statements about social violence
is correct, one which is in line with official statistics and one which corresponds
more closely to ‘television reality’. Their hypothesis is that heavy viewers of the
medium will more often give the ‘television answer’ to such questions than will
light viewers. In addition, they suppose that heavy viewers should draw certain
conclusions from what they have seen about how to react to the world of
violence. For example, they hypothesize that heavy viewers will more often
admit to being afraid to walk alone in the city streets at night and will show more
mistrust in their dealings with other people.
The findings reported by Gerbner et al. in a series of articles have usually
confirmed their expectations. Table 4 shows how their results, taken in this case
from a New Jersey sample of 447 7th-and 8th-grade school-children (aged 13–
14) are usually presented. For each of three sets of data (concerning the
prevalence of violence, the danger of urban strolls, and the trustworthiness of
other people, respectively) the left-hand column shows the percentage of light
TV viewers giving the ‘TV answer’. The difference between the responses of
light viewers and of heavy TV viewers has been labelled by Gerbner and his