Link Ch. 2 – Revisiting Dr. Gerbner and TV Violence

By and large, most people who aren’t media scholars would be hard pressed to name a single media theorist who isn’t Marshall McLuhan. But the one possible exception would be George Gerbner because of his cultivation theory. Dr. Gerbner testified before Congress about televised violence in October 1981, and his cultivation theory is one of the top three cited theoretical approaches in communication research.

Dr. Patrick E. Jamieson and Dr. Dan Romer at the University of Pennsylvania took a fresh look in 2014 at Gerbner’s work to see how it would hold up to an examination of twenty-five years of data about televised violence and people’s fear of crime. Jamieson and Romer looked at 475 hours of television programming and Gallup interviews with more than 27,000 people. In their study, they found that while increased violent content on television did not change people’s estimations of how dangerous the world around them was, it did make people more afraid of violence.

 Also, below are two older readings by Gerbner.

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