GEORGE GERBNER

Interview conducted at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, January 20, 1998.

George Gerbner fought fascism for a long time. Born in Hungary, he emigrated to the United States in the 1930s to get away from the Fascists, then returned to Europe during World War II to fight against them. A member of the U.S. Army, he parachuted behind German lines and fought alongside the partisans.

Through much of the twentieth century he fought another sort of fascism, the totalitarianism of corporate conglomerates that effectively govern our country and control our media. He no longer parachuted behind enemy lines. He counted murders and analyzed the stories told on television.

By the time children turn eighteen they have witnessed more than forty thousand murders and two hundred thousand other violent acts on television. They have also seen approximately four hundred thousand advertisements, each delivering essentially the same message: Buy now and you will feel better.

What are the effects of taking in this volume of violence? How do advertisements affect our perception of the world? George Gerbner's analysis moves far beyond facile descriptions of violence begetting violence. The effects are far more subtle and insidious, and they are infinitely more dangerous.

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Gerbner was a founder of the Cultural Indicators Project, an organization formed to study the relationship between violence in the media and society at large, and the Cultural Environment Movement, an umbrella of organizations dedicated to democratizing the media. He edited nine books, including Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Media Control Means for America and the World; Triumph of the Image: The Media's War in the Persian Gulf, An International Perspective; and The Information Gap: How Computers and Other Communication Technologies Affect the Distribution of Power. He wrote extensively on the relationship between human behavior and the stories that help to form us.

I met George Gerbner in San Francisco on January 20, 1998, while he was on a whirlwind speaking tour. We talked in the corner of a small cafeteria, focusing on the question Gerbner studied for decades: what does it mean to each of us when corporations tell all the stories?

George Gerbner: A few centuries ago, the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher wrote, "If I were permitted to write all the ballads, I need not care who makes the laws of the nation." He was right. Ballads, or more broadly stories, socialize us into our roles as men and women and affect our identities. Our parents, schools, communities, churches, nations, and others used to be our society's storytellers, but over the past fifty years this role has been taken over by marketing conglomerates and people who have a great deal to sell. This transformation has profoundly changed the way our children are socialized. It has made a significant contribution to the way our societies are governed. It has changed the way we live.

In the average American household the television is on for seven hours and forty-one minutes per day. That's a lot of time, but that's not the main problem. The main problem is that the stories we see and hear on TV are very limited, despite the deceptive proliferation of cable channels. Shows may vary in style or even plot, but the elements I consider to be the building blocks of storytelling, casting and fate, are strikingly similar across the board. Think about the characters that animate the world of prime-time drama, which is where most of the action and most of the viewing time is. What is their demography? What is the fate of the different groups — men and women, young and old, rich and poor, and so on? The studies I have conducted with the Cultural Indicators Project show that character casting and fate follows stable patterns over time.

Derrick Jensen: What types of patterns?

GG: Men outnumber women in prime-time television two to one, children, elderly people, and nonwhite people are underrepresented, and poor people are virtually absent.

DJ: Please explain why this is important.

GG: Socialization — the telling of all the stories — is what makes us develop into who we are; stories teach us our social roles. People who are well-represented in stories see many opportunities, many choices. The opposite is true for those who are underrepresented, or are represented only in a particular way. For example, women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are generally cast only for romantic roles. What message does that impart to young girls growing up? We have a contract with the Screen Actors Guild to study why so many of its female members stop getting calls when they're thirty-five, and only start getting them again when they're old enough to play grandmothers. What does that invisibility teach women about their roles in society? Men play romantic leads until they totter into their graves. How does that affect people's perception of their opportunities for love, sex, and human companionship?

Casting dictates the demography of the symbolic world. Think about the ratios of success to failure and victimizer to victimized experienced by various demographic groups in the world of television. If you look at who is consistently doing what to whom, you see a great homogeneity. It's a strictly regulated and relatively inflexible system.

The over- or underrepresentation of demographic groups in these stories leads to a skewing of the types of stories that can be told. Because most scripts are written by and for men, they project a world in which men rule, and in which men play most of the roles. Scripts are constructed to satisfy the demands of a market — which is not, by the way, the same as the demands of an audience. Because a film or television producer cannot really hope to make money solely in the United States, most producers target their stories for a world market. What themes need no translation? What themes are essentially image-driven, universal? Sex and violence. The demands of an international market reinforce the predilections of male writers.

And society's patriarchal power structure ensures that men are the ones having sex and wielding weapons onscreen. Year by year, you might see a 5–15 percent change, but never a steady trend toward greater diversity.

DJ: How do you know all this?

GG: The Cultural Indicators Project is a nonprofit formed to study not only violence on television, but the relationship between the stories we are told and society at large. Every year we take a sample of characters in prime-time dramatic programming and add them to our database, which by now contains profiles of some forty-five thousand characters. We've been doing this for thirty years, during which time the patterns have been stable.

DJ: I'm still fuzzy on how "casting and fate" affects the real world.

GG: How does schooling affect the real world? By socializing us. Casting and fate work the same way, except the lessons they teach us start in infancy and continue throughout life. Television has become the universal...