WATCHING US WATCH TV
“For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set”
Television was young when it got its first nicknames. Boob Tube. Idiot Box. Vast Wasteland. But it took a Hungarian immigrant, armed with statistics, to show that TV is not silly but sinister.
Back when Westerns were giving way to cop shows, George Gerbner hired a bunch of students to do what they had grown up doing — watch TV. But as they watched, Gerbner’s students took notes.
Exactly how many violent incidents were on TV per hour? Who were the victims? Who did the killing? Earlier studies had linked TV viewing to aggression, but Gerbner wondered. Might watching all that mayhem lead instead to fear? To victimization?
As his data piled up, Gerbner gave TV’s critics a fresh focus. “Boob Tube” suggested mindless fun, but TV, Gerbner saw, creates a “mean world syndrome.” And meanness was something George Gerbner knew well.
During Gerbner’s teen years, his native Budapest fell under the Nazi boot. Suddenly, Gerbner needed no script to read his fate. Shortly after Kristallnacht, when stormtroopers shattered the shop windows and last hopes of Jews, Gerbner and his family fled to America.
He had hoped to study folklore but landing in California, he switched to journalism. He wrote for newspapers for awhile, but a new world was emerging onscreen and Gerbner found it fascinating. Grad school led to professorships in Media Studies. Then in 1964, as “Bonanza” and “Bewitched” topped Nielsen ratings, Gerbner became dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.
When Gerbner began charting TV, Americans watched an average of five hours per day. A waste of time, some scoffed, but Gerbner’s Cultural Indicators Project thickened the plot.
Along with charting violence, Gerbner’s students probed perceptions of the world — which some prefer to call “the real world.” Dividing viewers into Light Viewers (two hours a day), Medium (two-to-four), and Heavy (four-to-God knows how many hours daily), Gerbner asked each: had they ever, for the sake of protection, bought a dog? A gun? Were they afraid to walk alone at night? To visit certain parts of town? How did they feel about this Real World? Was life getting better? Safer?
On through the 1970s, as viewing rose to seven hours daily, Gerbner’s students crunched the numbers. Their annual reports spoke of behavioral correlates, synthetic cultural patterns, Cultivation Theory. . . But like the movie “Network” and its “mad as hell” viewers, it all added up to a “mean world.”
Those heavy viewers, the ones who live in the Country of Television? Gerbner found them more fearful, more likely to own guns or attack dogs, to stay in at night, to see the world as crime-ridden, in decline. Heavy viewers agreed: most people "cannot be trusted." More cops were needed.
Testifying before Congress, Gerbner summed up: “If you are growing up in a home where there is more than, say, three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world - and act accordingly - than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television. The programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia.”
A child’s world was meaner still. By age 18, “kids” had seen 8,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence. Alarmed, the man who loved folk tales issued a chilling indictment of America’s favorite storyteller. “Who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior,” Gerbner said. “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.”
Oh, but that was then, when TV was young and foolish. No, just look at all there is to watch! Netflix. Hulu. A gazillion cable channels. Surely “The Great British Baking Show” presents no “mean world.” Perhaps not, but when Gerbner began his studies, news aired just an hour a day. Now TV’s newsbeat is relentless and, using Gerbner’s methods, studies show it skews perceptions of crime (actually been dropping for decades), and illegal immigration (flat between 2008-2016), and even (gasp!) politics.
“Fearful people,” Gerbner said, “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.” Hmmm...
George Gerbner died in 2005 but his “mean world” lives on. In recent years the syndrome has been found in users of social media, the Internet, anyone who sees the world through a glass, darkly.
The same year that George Gerbner came to America, 1939, also saw TV’s public debut. Watching a primitive broadcast at the New York World’s Fair, E.B. White wrote: “I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.”
Draw your own conclusions.